"I know it," was the answer. "He's just stopped in front of the Palace Hotel," and with a sigh Billy Ricks hung up the telephone receiver, eying that instrument in huge disfavor. In the mean time, Main Street, which had relapsed into slumber for two weeks, was once more wide awake. Hope and J. Rufus Wallingford had come back to town. There was no avenue of trade that did not feel the quickening influence within an hour. Even his appearance, as he stepped from the touring car, clad richly to the last detail of the part, conveyed a golden promise. Mrs. Wallingford, mostly fluttering veil, was another promise, and even the sedate G. W. Battles so far forgot his dignity as to come across from the bank in his bare head and shake hands with the great magnate. Quick as he was, however, Judge Lampton was there before him. His half of the option money left behind by Mr. Wallingford had wrought a tremendous change in the Judge, for now the beard that he had worn straggling for so long was cut Vandyke and kept carefully trimmed--and instead of a stogie he was smoking a cigar. Warmed by their enthusiastic reception, the Wallingfords amiably forgot the purely private and personal quarrel between Mrs. Wallingford and Mrs. Daw, which had disrupted the happy quartette and nipped in the bud an itinerary that had been planned through to San Francisco, and they plunged into a new life with great zest. For years J. Rufus had been content to make a few thousand dollars and spend them, but his last haul of a hundred and fifty thousand that he had received from the perfectly legitimate sale of another man's patent for which the inventor got nothing, had stirred in him the desire not merely to live like a multi-millionaire, but to be one. As the first step in his upward and onward progress he transferred his hundred odd thousand dollars from an Eastern depository to the Battles County Bank. Next he took ninety-day options upon all the unoccupied property in Battlesburg, including several acres of ground beyond the Battles & Battles Pure Food Creamery and Cheese Concern. He was not so improvident as to pay cash for these options, however; instead, he gave ninety-day notes, writing across the face of each one: "Not negotiable until after maturity." The first of these notes Judge Lampton took to the Honorable G. W. Battles inquiringly. The autocrat of Battles County merely smiled. "I'll lend you face value on it, Tommy, any time you want it," he observed; and that was the last notch in establishing the local credit of J. Rufus Wallingford, for Judge Lampton was in his way as persistent a disseminator as Billy Ricks himself.