ou really are,
Peter!"

Well, the weeks passed, and to mark progress he occasionally sent me
clippings of telegrams, cut not from his pages, if you please, but from
such austere journals as the _Sun_ and _World_ of New York, the _North
American_ of Philadelphia, the _Courant_ of Hartford, recording the
antics of his imaginary thing of the woods. Longish articles actually
began to appear here and there, in Eastern papers especially, describing
the exploits of this very elusive and moving demon. He had been seen in
a dozen fairly widely distributed places within the month, but always
coming northward. In one place he had killed three cows at once, in
another two, and eaten portions of them raw! Old Mrs. Gorswitch of
Dutchers Run, Pennsylvania, returning from a visit to her
daughter-in-law, Annie A. Gorswitch, and ambling along a lonely road in
Osgoroola County, was suddenly descended upon by a most horrific figure,
half man, half beast, very tall and with long hair and red, all but
bloody eyes who, looking at her with avid glance, made as if to seize
her, but a wagon approaching along the road from another direction, he
had desisted and fled, leaving old Mrs. Gorswitch in a faint upon the
ground. Barns and haystacks had been fired here and there, lonely widows
in distant cotes been made to abandon their homes through fear.... I
marveled at the assiduity and patience of the man.

One day in June or July following, being in Newark and asking Peter
quite idly about his wild man, he replied, "Oh, it's great, great!
Couldn't be better! He'll soon be here now. We've got the whole thing
arranged now for next Sunday or Saturday--depends on which day I can get
off. We're going to photograph him. Wanto come over?"

"What rot!" I said. "Who's going to pose? Where?"

"Well," he chuckled, "come along and see. You'll find out fast enough.
We've got an actual wild man. I got him. I'll have him out here in the
woods. If you don't believe it, come over. You wouldn't believe me when
I said I could get the natives worked up. Well, they are. Look at
these," and he produced clippings from rival papers. The wild man was
actually being seen in Essex County, not twenty-five miles from Newark.
He had ravaged the property of people in five different States. It was
assumed that he was a lunatic turned savage, or that he had escaped from
a circus or trading-ship wrecked on the Jersey coast (suggestions made
by Peter himself). His depredations, a