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 you 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