mind, Judge, there ain't no
manner of doubt but whut prosperity has went to his head and turned it.
He acted to me like a plum' distracted idiot. A grown man with forty
thousand pounds of solid money settin' on the side of a gutter eatin'
jimcracks with a passel of dirty little boys! Kin you figure it out any
other way, Judge--except that his mind is gone?"

"I don't set myself up to be a specialist in mental disorders, son,"
said Judge Priest softly; "but, sence you ask me the question, I should
say, speakin' offhand, that it looks to me more ez ef the heart was the
organ that was mainly affected. And possibly"--he added this last with a
dry little smile--"and possibly, by now, the stomach also."

* * *

Whether or not Mr. Quarles was correct in his psychopathic diagnosis, he
certainly had been right when he told Judge Priest that the word was
already all over the business district. It had spread fast and was still
spreading; it spread to beat the wireless, traveling as it did by that
mouth-to-ear method of communication which is so amazingly swift and
generally so tremendously incorrect. Persons who could not credit the
tale at all, nevertheless lost no time in giving to it a yet wider
circulation; so that, as though borne on the wind, it moved in every
direction, like ripples on a pond; and with each time of retelling the
size of the legacy grew.

The _Daily Evening News_, appearing on the streets at five P. M.,
confirmed the tale; though by its account the fortune was reduced to a
sum far below the gorgeously exaggerated estimates of most of the
earlier narrators. Between breakfast and supper-time Peep O'Day's
position in the common estimation of his fellow citizens underwent a
radical and revolutionary change. He ceased--automatically, as it
were--to be a town character; he became, by universal consent, a town
notable, whose every act and every word would thereafter be subjected to
close scrutiny and closer analysis.

The next morning the nation at large had opportunity to know of the
great good fortune that had befallen Paul Felix O'Day, for the story had
been wired to the city papers by the local correspondents of the same;
and the press associations had picked up a stickful of the story and
sped it broadcast over leased wires. Many who until that day had never
heard of the fortunate man, or, indeed, of the place where he lived, at
once manifested a concern in his well-being.

Certain firms of investment b