the country today, and
in a fair way to make his own home town just as celebrated. It may
sound funny to you, for you don't know the back-country as I do, but
just that short article in the daily, coupled with a few helpful hints
from me that I was looking for all the nice, touching incidents of his
boyhood days, with the opinions of the oldest inhabitants, and maybe a
few of their pictures to be used in a big Sunday feature, brought them
all out: the old circle of regulars which always sits around the
tavern stove nights, straightening out the country's politics and
attending strictly to everybody's affairs but their own.

"Eager? Man, it was a stampede! I reckon that every male inhabitant
within a radius of five miles was there when I opened the meeting with
a few choice words--every man but one, and he comes in just a little
later in this tale. They surely did turn out. It was as perfect a
mass meeting as any I've ever seen, but the crowd itself didn't get
much of a chance to talk--not individually anyhow. They were simply
the chorus of 'ayes' which the town's big man paused now and then for
them to voice.

"He did the talking, Flash. They called him 'Judge'--they most always
do in those towns. He most certainly monopolized the conversation, and
while he gave his monologue, I sat and got the best of them down on
paper. They thought I was taking notes. I'll show you his picture some
day. He's the meanest man I ever met yet--and I've met a few!
Puffy-faced and red, and too close between the eyes. Fat, too! Somehow
I'm ashamed of being plump myself, since meeting him.

"He did all the talking, and from the very first time he opened his
mouth I knew he was lying. You can always tell a professional liar; he
lies too smoothly, somehow. Well, to judge from his story Conway was
the only unspotted cherub child that had ever been born and bred in
that section. Oh, yes, _he'd_ seen the promise in Conway; _he_ knew
that Conway was to be the pride and joy of the community, right from
the first. _He'd_ always said so! Why, _he_ was the very man who had
given him his first pointers in the game, when he was cleaning up all
the rest of the boys in town, just by way of recreation. If I'd never
had a suspicion before I'd have known just from those slick sentences
of his that Conway had never been anything in that village but a
small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he is today.

"But I didn't have any reason to contradict him