ses stuck.
He plunged into the sciences, and arose from the immersion dripping with
a smattering of astronomy, chemistry, biology, archaeology, and what not.
The occult was to him an open book, and he was wont temporarily to
paralyze the small talk of social gatherings with dissertations upon the
teachings of the ancients which he had swallowed at a gulp. He
criticised the schools of modern painting in impressive art terms, while
he himself dashed off half-column poems at a sitting for the _Courier_,
in which he had acquired controlling stock.

In other words, by a certain amount of industry, T. Victor Sprudell had
become a walking encyclopaedia of misinformation with small danger of
being found out so long as he stayed in Bartlesville.

Certainly Abe Cone--born Cohen--who had made his "barrel" in ready-made
clothing, felt in no position to contradict him when he stated his
belief in the theory of transmigration as expounded by Pythagoras, and
expressed the opinion that by chance the soul of Cleopatra might be
occupying the graceful body of the club cat. Abe was not acquainted with
the doctrine of Pythagoras, though he had heard somewhere that the lady
was a huzzy; so he discreetly kept his mouth closed and avoided the cat.
Intellectually Sprudell's other associates were of Abe's caliber, so he
shone among them, the one bright, particular star--too vain, too
fundamentally deficient to know how little he really knew.

Nevertheless he was the most thoroughly detested, the most hated man in
Bartlesville. And those who hated feared him as they hated and feared
the incendiary, the creeping thief, the midnight assassin; for he used
their methods to attain his ends, along with a despot's power.

No man or woman who pricked his vanity, who incurred his displeasure,
was safe from his vengeance. No person who wounded his self-esteem was
too obscure to escape his vindictive malice, and no means that he could
employ, providing it was legally safe, was too unscrupulous, too petty,
to use to punish the offender. Hounding somebody was his recreation, his
one extravagance. He exhumed the buried pasts of political candidates
who had crossed him; he rattled family skeletons in revenge for social
slights; he published musty prison records, and over night blasted
reputations which had been years in the building. His enmity cost
salaried men positions through pressure which sooner or later he always
found the way to bring to bear, and ev