I need not dwell upon my return to Waydean that evening. It is still painful to recall my sensations as I stepped from the train, on finding that Joe Wrigley had so completely disregarded my instructions to tell no one of the discovery that the usually quiet country road between the station and Waydean swarmed with pedestrians returning from an inspection of William Wedder's handiwork. Had I been permitted, as I had hoped, to publicly expose the fraud, I could have risen to the occasion and perhaps found a certain solace in doing so; but to find that in my absence the prying eyes of my neighbors had found the ingenious mechanism by which William had manufactured a flowing well of refined petroleum, and had attributed it to me, was crushing. I could bear up under the facetious remarks of the people who complimented me on my success in taking such an excellent rise out of Peter, but when Andy Taylor rushed out of his house and clapped me on the back, I could only look at him in sorrowful reproach, at which his merriment increased. "Mr. Carton," he gasped, "it beats the way you done up that Griggs all hollow. I knew you'd get back on Peter, but I didn't know it'd be so--gosh--darn--rich. Oh Lordy, to see him when the loose dirt shifted and showed the blue end of the coal-oil barrel!" "The coal-oil barrel?" "Yes,--you'd ought to have laid a few boards of top of the heap, and it wouldn't have shifted with people trampin'. You must have let ten gallons run down that iron pipe--and how did you ever get it drove so far? I suppose that joke cost you as much as five dollars, but I'd say it was cheap at ten." In vain I assured Andy that I was innocent; he only laughed the harder, reiterating his belief that I beat the Dutch and that I was a natural born play-actor; that the Griggs episode, charming as it had been, was discounted by my latest histrionic venture. By the dim light of my lantern, Marion, Paul and I viewed the wreck of the Waydean Oil Well when I reached home. Our coal-oil barrel, exhumed from the loose earth that had covered it, had been rolled away from the edge of the hole, leaving the iron pipe exposed. The ground was packed hard with the trampling of many feet. "I didn't think there could be such a crowd of people in the country, except at a funeral or an auction sale," said Marion indignantly. "I was just enraged to sit in the house and see them pass through the yard as if it were a common. I'll never forgive William Wedder--I wish I had never baked him a pie."