“Talleyrand?” he asked, puzzled. “Oh, one of those book characters you admire so much, I s’pose. Yes, he was all right in that proposition. But a lot of times the truth will hide a man’s thoughts even better. It was by telling the truth I got out of the worst hole I ever was in. Ever tell you the mix-up I had with the Mountain State Coal Company?” “Coal Company? I didn’t know there was any coal in the Mountain State.” “No more there is. Only I didn’t know it then. A chap came along and interested me in the deal. He said he’d struck a rich coal vein up in Jericho County. Showed me specimens. Got ’em somewhere in Pennsylvania, I s’pose. And got me to float a company. Well, the stuff they took out of the measly shaft was a sort of porous black slate or shale or something, and it wouldn’t burn if you put it in a white-hot blast furnace. One look showed me that. And there I was with a company capitalized at $300,000—half of it my own money—and suckers subscribing for the stock and all that, and a gang of a couple of hundred Ginneys and Svensks at work in the pit. It wasn’t that I minded the cash loss so much as I minded being played for a jay, and the black eye it would give any companies I might float in the future. “I’ll tell you, I was pretty sore. I was younger in those days, you see. I ran up to Jericho to look over the wreck. Next day was pay day for the hands, and I hadn’t enough cash with me for half of ’em. I sat in my hotel that night thinking of the row and smashup there’d be next morning, and just wishing I had a third foot to kick myself with. The lamp got low, and I called for the landlord to fill it. Some of the kerosene leaked out while he was doing it and spilled over a handful of the ore that was lying on the table. That porous stuff soaked it up like a sponge. The mess made me sick, and I picked up the samples of near-coal and slammed ’em into the fireplace. They blazed like a Sheeney clothing store.” “I thought you said it wouldn’t burn.” “The pieces were soaked in kerosene, and of course they burned, just as a lamp would if you threw it in the fire. But it gave me the tip I wanted. I bolted out of that hotel and hunted up a couple of my own crowd. We had the busiest night on record. No use bothering you with details. A shed, three barrels of kerosene and a half a ton of ore. Then early next morning I wandered into the hotel office and did a despairful scream. I’d seen to it that the editor of the local paper was there, and I knew a bunch of the ‘big guns’ of the place always congregated in the office for an after-breakfast gossip. Well, I groaned pretty loud and hectic about the way I’d been stuck on the ore. “‘What’s the matter with it?’ asked one of my two pals. ‘Won’t the stuff burn?’