in a Sunday feature way,
by newspapers all over the country, and finally involved Peter as an
actor and stage manager of the most vivid type imaginable. And yet it
was all done really to amuse himself, to see if he could do it, as he
often told me.

This particular hoax related to that silly old bugaboo of our boyhood
days, the escaped and wandering wild man, ferocious, blood-loving,
terrible. I knew nothing of it until Peter, one Sunday afternoon when we
were off for a walk a year or two after he had arrived in Newark,
suddenly announced apropos of nothing at all, "Dreiser, I've just hit
upon a great idea which I am working out with some of the boys down on
our paper. It's a dusty old fake, but it will do as well as any other,
better than if it were a really decent idea. I'm inventing a wild man.
You know how crazy the average dub is over anything strange,
different,'terrible.' Barnum was right, you know. There's one born every
minute. Well, I'm just getting this thing up now. It's as good as the
sacred white elephant or the blood-sweating hippopotamus. And what's
more, I'm going to stage it right here in little old Newark--and they'll
all fall for it, and don't you think they won't," and he chuckled most
ecstatically.

"For heaven's sake, what's coming now?" I sighed.

"Oh, very well. But I have it all worked out just the same. We're
beginning to run the preliminary telegrams every three or four days--one
from Ramblersville, South Jersey, let us say, another from Hohokus,
twenty-five miles farther on, four or five days later. By degrees as
spring comes on I'll bring him north--right up here into Essex County--a
genuine wild man, see, something fierce and terrible. We're giving him
long hair like a bison, red eyes, fangs, big hands and feet. He's
entirely naked--or will be when he gets here. He's eight feet tall. He
kills and eats horses, dogs, cattle, pigs, chickens. He frightens men
and women and children. I'm having him bound across lonely roads, look
in windows at night, stampede cattle and drive tramps and peddlers out
of the country. But say, wait and see. As summer comes on we'll make a
regular headliner of it. We'll give it pages on Sunday. We'll get the
rubes to looking for him in posses, offer rewards. Maybe some one will
actually capture and bring in some poor lunatic, a real wild man. You
can do anything if you just stir up the natives enough."

I laughed. "You're crazy," I said. "What a low comedian y