your--ahem!--sober
senses in about a month's time, when the date of your second payment
would be long gone by and your precious Agreement for Sale, if ever
you happened to remember it again, would be simply so much waste
paper. He would throw half a dozen fits, right now, if he knew you
were--ahem!--_compos mentis_, with five days still to go to make two
thousand dollars--maybe. But I'm wasting your precious time, Jim," he
continued. "Get out your pen, and ink, and paper, and get busy;--eight
dime novels of thirty thousand words apiece--two hundred and forty
thousand words a day for five days! Shades of Sir Walter Scott and
Balzac!"

He laughed. "I wouldn't do it, Jim;--no, not for a farm!"

And Phil went back to the smithy as Jim continued dressing, doing a
little special thinking, the while, on the side.

All that day, the mystery of who painted DeRue Hannington's horse was
the talk of the town.

Several painters and paper-hangers, as they went about their business
in garments that betrayed their calling, were glared at in open
suspicion. The reward of one hundred dollars read very good and a sort
of hidden-treasure-hunt look was in the eyes of many.

The next day blue notices instead of white were tacked to the
telegraph poles and the hoardings. With DeRue Hannington's anger and
indignation, the reward had risen in the night. It now stood at five
hundred dollars.

In unison, the keenness of the hunt for the perpetrator of the
so-called dastardly outrage rose four hundred per cent.

Meanwhile, Jim did not go to work at the Court House as he had
practically said, nor yet did he go outside. He sat quietly in his own
room, smoking his pipe and reading Emerson and Professor Drummond,
which, of course, was quite in keeping with the peculiarities of his
temperament. He had little to say to Phil as the latter dropped in to
see him from time to time; and the all-absorbing topic of the
town--DeRue Hannington's big reward--seemed to interest him about as
much as did the approaching dissolution of his hold on the ranch he
had contracted to purchase from Rattlesnake Dalton.

Phil looked in vain for signs of diligence in the direction of stories
from the pen of Captain Mayne Plunkett, and articles on the affairs of
the heart by Aunt Christina.

In the language of the farm, Jim was simply _sawing wood_.

For two days, the signs on the telegraph poles remained blue in
colour.

On the evening of that second day Jim ve