But Battlesburg alone was not a large enough field for Wallingford. Having tied up about half the town, he left "for a little pleasure jaunt;" but before he went away he bought the Star Boarding House and gave Judge Lampton _carte blanche_ to fit up that magnificent ten-room structure as a private residence, according to certain general plans and requirements laid down by the purchaser. When Mr. and Mrs. Wallingford came back two weeks later, that palatial dwelling was perfect in all its arrangements and appointments, even to the stocking of its cellars and the hiring of Letty Kirby as cook and Bessie Walker as maid, and of Billy Ricks as gardener and man-of-all-work. The vast sensation that might have been created by the hiring of three servants, and by the other lusciously extravagant expenditures faithfully chronicled in the daily issues of the Battlesburg _Blade_, was, however, swallowed up in a still greater sensation; for during the absence of the noted financier Mr. Wallingford had become a vast throbbing mystery to the town of his adoption. He had been gone only two days, when, in the _Blade_, there appeared the heading: OUR MILLIONAIRE Favors Paris with Crumbs of the Good Fortune Falling from Battlesburg's Table The article that followed was a clipping from the Paris _Times_, and from this it seemed that Colonel J. Rufus Wallingford, the famous multi-millionaire, late of Boston and New York but now of their neighbor and county seat, Battlesburg, had been purchasing property liberally along the main street of Paris, giving in exchange his promissory notes for ninety days, which notes, upon the telephonic advice of the Honorable G. W. Battles, of Battlesburg, were as good as gold. Similar reports were reprinted later on from the London _News_, the Dublin _Banner_, the Berlin _Clarion_, the Rome _Vindicator_, and from the papers of other towns still farther away. It was Clint Richards who became the Sherlock Holmes of Battlesburg and found the solution to this mystery, being led thereto by the fact that the only towns where Mr. Wallingford was purchasing this property were along the direct east and west highway, which, running through Battlesburg, paralleled the P. D. S. Railroad from Lewisville to Elliston. These two towns were not only the terminals of the P. D. S. Railroad, but were also the respective outposts of the great Midland Valley traction system and the vast Golden West traction system. The conclusion was obvious that either Colonel Wallingford intended to finance a traction road connecting those two great terminal points, or that he had absolute knowledge that such a line was to be built; _and Colonel Wallingford had chosen Battlesburg for his headquarters_!