He turned the book over, keeping a skeptical eye on me. The one Texan who could read knelt behind him and looked over his shoulder. I recited the seventeen titles, beginning of course with Orson Oxx, Man of Iron. Then for good measure I recited the novel’s stirring finale, a battle fought with rapiers on the yard-arms high above Captain Kidd’s burning ship, in which Orson Oxx runs the desperate pirate through the gullet before diving into shark-infested waters and swimming to Mobile, Alabama. The Texans seemed to appreciate the recital a good deal; they ceased rattling their spurs or loading their guns, and when I went on to render word for word Orson’s great battle with the giant crocodile he encountered in Mobile Bay, not a man moved until I finished describing how Orson whirled the giant reptile around his head and flung it to its death off a rocky cliff.

“Convinced?” I asked Isinglass when I stopped.

“Nope,” the old man said, though I believe he had enjoyed the recital as much as the others.

“The name on the cover of that book is Benjamin J. Sippy,” I said, pitching him my wallet. It had my name stamped on it in gold, and inside was my letter of credit and a little note I had been sent by the Chief of Police of Philadelphia telling me how much he had enjoyed my half-dimer The Dying Policeman; or, the Strangler’s Bet. The chief even invited me to stop by the jail any time and said I could study the criminals to my heart’s content.

All these and a few other documents were studied in close detail by the criminals who held my life in their hands.

“Why, didn’t you write Sandycraw in Comanche Land?” the one literate Texan asked. “I recall it was by the same fellow who wrote the Oxx stories.”

“Yes, Sandycraw was my first creation,” I said, and proceded to reel off the titles of the twenty-two Sandycraw adventures.

“Seventeen and twenty-two makes thirty-nine,” Isinglass said. “That’s a lot of books for one human being to write.”

“Oh, that’s not all,” I said. “Those are just the series. I suppose I’ve written around sixty-five booklets in all.”

“It’s a hard thing to believe,” Isinglass said. “There’s a lot of words in this book. If you take these words and you multiply by sixty-five, which is the number of books you say you’ve written, it comes out to a terrible passel of words.”