“My uncle has often regretted that you have never met,” says the Bald Impostor. “If he had known I was to be in Riverbank he would have sent his copy of your work, ‘Liens and Torts,’ to be autographed.”
“Liens and Torts” is the one volume written by Judge Orley Morvis mentioned in “Who’s Who.” The Judge becomes mellower than ever.
“Ah, yes!” says the Judge, tickled, “and how is your uncle, may I ask?”
“In excellent health considering his age. You know he is ninety-seven,” says the Bald Impostor, having got the “b. June 23, 1817” from “Who’s Who.” “But his toe still bothers him. A man of his age, you know. Such things heal slowly.”
“No! I didn’t hear of that,” says the Judge, intensely interested. He is going to get some intimate details.
“Oh, it was quite dreadful!” says the Bald Impostor. “He dropped a volume of Coke on Littleton on it last March—no, it was April, because it was April he spent at my mother’s.”
All this is pure invention, and that is where the Bald Impostor leads all others. Even as he invents details of the sore toe, you see, he introduces his mother.
“She was taken sick early in April,” he says, and presently he has Dr. Somebody-Big out of “Who’s Who” attending to the Chief Justice’s sore toe and advising the mother to try the Denver climate. And the next thing the Judge knows the Bald Impostor is telling that he is now on his way back from Denver to Chicago.
So then it comes out. The Bald Impostor sits on the edge of his chair and becomes nervous and perspires. Perspiring is a sure sign a man is unaccustomed to asking a loan, and the Bald Impostor is entitled to start the first School of Free Perspiring in America. He can perspire in December, when the furnace is out and the windows are open. All his head pores have self-sprinklers or something of the sort. He is as free with beads of perspiration as the early Indian traders were with beads of glass. He mops them with a white silk handkerchief.