As You Like
It" by the Boothby Company, set for Tinkletown on the following Thursday
night. Hapgood's Grove had been selected by the agent as the place in
which the performance should be given.

"Don't they give an afternoon show?" asked Mrs. Williams.

"Sure not," said Harry curtly. "It isn't a museum."

"Of course not," added Anderson Crow reflectively. "It's a troupe."

The next morning, bright and early, Mark Riley fared forth with paste
and brush. Before noon, the board fences, barns and blank walls of
Tinkletown flamed with great red and blue letters, twining in and about
the portraits of Shakespeare, Manager Boothby, Rosalind, Orlando, and an
extra king or two in royal robes. A dozen small boys spread the hand
bills from the _Banner_ presses, and Tinkletown was stirred by the
excitement of a sensation that had not been experienced since
Forepaugh's circus visited the county seat three years before. It went
without saying that Manager Boothby would present "As You Like It" with
an "unrivalled cast." He had "an all-star production," direct from "the
leading theatres of the universe."

When Mark Riley started out again in the afternoon for a second
excursion with paste and brush, "slapping up" small posters with a
celerity that bespoke extreme interest on his part, the astonished
populace feared that he was announcing a postponement of the
performance. Instead of that, however, he was heralding the fact that
the Hemisphere Trunk Line and Express Company would gladly pay ten
thousand dollars reward for the "apprehension and capture" of the men
who robbed one of its richest trains a few nights before, seizing as
booty over sixty thousand dollars in money, besides killing two
messengers in cold blood. The great train robbery occurred in the
western part of the State, hundreds of miles from Tinkletown, but nearly
all of its citizens had read accounts of the deed in the weekly paper
from Boggs City.

"I seen the item about it in Mr. Gregory's New York paper," said
Anderson Crow to the crowd at Lamson's.

"Gee whiz, it must 'a' been a peach!" said Isaac Porter, open-mouthed
and eager for details. Whereupon Marshal Crow related the story of the
crime which stupefied the world on the morning of July 31st. The express
had been held up in an isolated spot by a half-dozen masked men. A safe
had been shattered and the contents confiscated, the perpetrators
vanishing as completely as if aided by Satan himself. The author