burbled greeting.

"You don't mean to tell me that _this_ is the West to which you said
you were coming?"

"I'm not lost; I'm here. It's father who is lost," she laughed. Then she
answered his question; "Yes, this is the West I meant, and if you
haven't been telling the truth about it--"

Blount had snatched up the two hand-bags and had effected a reunion of
the scattered pair. The little gentleman, standing immovable, as he had
been told to do, was blinking impatiently through his reading-glasses at
the surging throng. When Blount came up, the professor stabbed him with
a sharp forefinger.

"Well, we're here, young man," he barked. "If you've been telling me
fibs about those Megalosauridae which you said could be dug out of your
sage-brush hills, you'll pay our fare back home again--just make up your
mind to that. Now show us the best hotel in this mushroom city of yours,
and do it quickly."

Having a hospitable thing to do, Blount shoved his problem into a still
more remote background and bestirred himself generously. Though the
Inter-Mountain was only three squares distant, he chartered the
best-looking auto he could find in the rank of waiting vehicles, put his
charges into it, and went with them to do the honors at the hotel. By
this postponement of the visit to Gantry he missed a meeting which would
have done something toward solving a part of his problem. But for the
hospitable turning aside he might have reached the railroad office in
time to see a round-bodied man halting at the open door of Gantry's
private room for a parting word with the traffic manager.

"Oh, yes; he fell for it, all right," was the form the parting word
took. "If you had seen his face when Lackner and I came away, you'd have
said there was battle, murder, and sudden death in it for somebody."

"But, see here, Bradbury," Gantry held his visitor to say, "it wasn't in
the game that you were to fill him up with a lot of lies. I won't stand
for that, you know. He is too good a fellow, and too good a friend of
mine."

It was at this conjuncture that Blount, if he had been present and
invisible, would have seen a sour smile wrinkling upon the face of the
club gossip.

"I owe the senator one or two on my own account, Gantry. But it wasn't
necessary to go out of the beaten path. If young Blount or his daddy
would like to sue us for libel, we could prove every word that was
said--or prove that it was common report; too common to be doubt