With no further words he took from his desk his private check book and wrote Mr. Wallingford an order for fifteen hundred dollars. Then, as by a common impulse, they walked straight up to the office of the Battlesburg _Blade_. That evening's issue flamed anew. The big hotel was a certainty. It would be called the Battles House. It would be four or five stories in height, and ground would be broken for it as soon as the plans could be prepared. In the same item were published the details of the real estate transaction. Mr. Battles had paid two thousand dollars for his own property, which, less than two months before, he had agreed to sell at five hundred dollars! Battlesburg was waking up. Mr. Geldenstein and Henry Quig came to Mr. Wallingford with another proposition. Did he intend to build the new opera house, or would he care to dispose of the property he had secured with that end in view? As a favor to them he would dispose of it. With the money he had received from Mr. Battles he had already taken up his option on this and other property, and he let the opera-house syndicate have it for three thousand, four times what it had cost him. In the papers of Paris, London, Dublin, Berlin, Rome, these things were retold, and the temperature of those places went up another degree or two. Keeping his fingers carefully upon the pulse of the town, Wallingford began to draw upon his capital and close in his options. Men whose property he had been holding in leash, accepted that money with wailing and gnashing of teeth, but, within a week, whatever of selfish bitterness they might have held was forgotten in the fever of speculation; for by the end of that time there appeared on the hill just east of town a gang of men with horses and scrapers--and they began chipping off the top of that hill! Wallingford was out there every morning in his buckboard and yellow leggings and yellow leather cap. The Battlesburg _Blade_ and all the other papers from Lewisville to Elliston blazed with the fact that actual construction work had begun upon the L., B. & E., and the time when trolleys would begin to whiz through the main streets of a dozen villages was calculated to a second. Supply men, the agents of street car shops, of ironworks, of electrical machinery and the like, began flocking to Battlesburg until even Pete Parsons woke up and raised his hotel rates; and the arrival of each one of them was heralded in Colonel Wallingford's invaluable adjunct, the Evening _Blade_. From these men Wallingford secured "cuts," which he distributed gratis, and pictures of the palatial L., B. & E. cars appeared in all the papers along its right of way; photographs of the special wheat cars, of the freight and express cars, even of the through sleeping cars which would traverse the L., B. & E., carrying passengers from the western limit of the Midland Valley traction system to the most eastern point of the Golden West traction system.