During the blustery season when Jefferson Peters folds and files away his repentances for future recollection, we met over a thin steak and a thinner cup of coffee to discuss the Ulyssean adventures with which Jeff, by virtue of his profession and the nation's police departments, has been so richly rewarded. "Hermaphrodism creates the seeds of its own destruction," said Jeff, lighting one of my slow burning brevas that serves as the powder train to the petards of his intellect. "Self-fertilization breeds auto-asepsis. Did I ever tell you about the fiasco that Andy Tucker and I devised in intra-catalysis and positive thinking? No? Well, it went something like this.
    "Me and Andy was on our way from New York. We had just sold a wealthy widow one of them modern obtuse paintings for $100,000. Fake? Not on your life! Me and Andy don't deal in counterfeits! Every penny of that money was the real McCoy!
    So as I say, after our lamentable involvement with that despicable art fraud, we decided that a change of scenery might lie along the path of prudence. We was on our way west when we re-discovered Columbus, Ohio. Columbus was originally discovered by Christopher Columbus back in 1493, but since then, nobody else has been able to find it again. It has only one city limit sign, and that has 'Columbus' printed on both sides of it. Columbus is located in the corn belt, near the buckle, and is the dormant domain and delinquent domicile of the Ohio State University. Now Andy and I have always had an urge to go to college and acquire the rudiments of intelligence and ratiocination, particularly in the fields of burglary, tax law, and automotive advertising. Besides, we were tired of civilization and this looked like the ideal aperture in it. We commenced looking for a room on High Street near the University but there weren't any.
    "Andy," said I, looking at the narrow crevice between two houses, "they must have moved these houses after they put them up. Otherwise, the bricklayers who built them would still be trapped in there."
    "No," said Andy, "if they had been moved, they`d have fallen down. The soot is the only thing holding them up."
    We finally found a room over under a third floor dormer in a brick blast furnace on North Fourth Street. It was a nice little room and cozy enough that you could paint it without getting out of bed, although that obviously had never been tried.
    After supper, we sat out on the verandah and talked over our present plans and future pretences. "Andy," said I, "how shall we go about infiltrating the ivy-covered bastions of this Oxford-of-the-Midwest? Shall we apply for jobs as faculty members? We have all the qualifications, except for knowledge, intelligence, and credentials. I could have degrees and discrete letters of recommendation ready by morning."
    "Why, Jeff," said Andy, "for shame! Swindling these too-tutored-tutors would be like fishing a trout farm by draining off all the water! All these illiterati know is what they read in photograph albums and soliloquize to each other. Where are your standards of ethical misconduct? Besides, I'm tired of impromptu cerebration and impetuous departures. For once, I want to relax for a while. Between the two of us, we've saved up enough money to pay a good part of an obstetrician's annual income tax. Now I want to do like Mr. Homer K.M. says, and loaf, with a jug of wine and a hundred thou, beside me, swinging in the wilderness. Let's settle down here and go to school for a while. There may be a lot we can learn about how industry and government skin the fatted cats. Now why don't you see what you can do about rustling us up some high school diplomas."
    "All right," said I, "I'll see what I can do."
    Andy always got an urge to diversify after a successful business deal whenever he was drunk or sober but I wasn't worried. I knew that after he had exchanged umbrages with the populace and attended a few seminars and sermons, he would return to a clean life of honest crime. It was in his nature. Andy was too clever to be honest. He could do almost anyone.
    The next morning, we started for the Arts and Sciences building along a narrow sidewalk that wound far beyond the hinterlands. It had been deposited at the edge of the Oval, where the Sciences had erected it and the Arts had disfigured it. We went inside and registered.
    The following morning, we started class. A few hours later, Andy came back as happy and exaggerated as a small boy who's just found a green frog to put in his sister's bed.
    "Oh, this is a vainglorious life!" said Andy. "This morning, there's a private art exhibition in the women's dormitory, this afternoon, there's a lecture on "How to Make Money, Though Educated", and tonight, we're going to burn the president of the university in effigy and toast marshmallows down on the Oval. It's all I'd ever dreamed college could be!"
    "It certainly does sound terribly tres," said I, "but during the meantime, I`ve been learning some more-useful things. Did you know that Columbus has more millionaires per square cornfield than Silicon Valley?"
    "No," said Andy, "but I've got to run now. I'm working on a project to count the number of Q's in ancient Chinese manuscripts."
    I could see that Andy was as happy as a pig rooting up your flower garden, and having a downright fatuous time. Meantime, I was absorbing what they taught us in class, besides learning some useful information.
    I noticed that Andy was taking a big interest in computers. Sometimes, he would talk about digital logic and monthly leasing fees, and other times, he would discuss integrated circuits and quarterly rental charges. But mostly, he expanded himself over Large Scale Integration and annual maintenance contracts. He began to mumble about it in his sleep. Finally, there came the awful day when his thinking shifted to straight binary and I knew that he had taken a trip on LSI! Now I don't usually worry much about Andy because he`s self-reliant, and I hold a $200,000 insurance policy on him. Just the same, though, I began to feel anxious and unmitigated. But it all came out all right after all. A few days later, Andy devolved the most thoughtful, honorable, and praiseworthy swindle since Jason pulled off the Golden Fleece, left his victims feeling sheepish, and took it on the lam.
    "Jeff," said he, "Mr. Julius Caesar once said, 'When in Rome, do the Romans', and I guess everybody has taken his turn doing them ever since. I have decided to follow their lead and do unto them before they get a chance to do unto us by letting some of these faculty members in on the uppermost subterranean floor of the computer industry. I've spotted a great potential market in computer services, spotting income tax evaders to be turned in for the reward, pilfering incriminating information out of personal files, forging corporate financial reports, falsifying bank accounts, and other practices widely accepted throughout the computing industry. After all, could you honestly impugn policies that are endorsed and practiced by industry and the U.S. federal government? Anyway, what I'm planning is your standard, strictly-legal kind of corporate swindle.
    "This will be a sort of cybernetic pyramid club. First, we graciously offer 100,000 shares of stock to ourselves at a kindly and open-hearted 10 cents a share. Then we sell the faculty another 100,000 shares at a more-than-generous 50 cents a share. Finally, we open it up to the public at $2.00 a share. It's economically sound, and we'll cover the technological and equal-opportunities angles by advertising such large scale integration that the Black Caucus will endorse it as the dark horse of the computer field."
    "Economically speaking," said I, "is there anything in this deal to reward you for your unselfish act of altruism?"
    "No," said Andy. "Not really. I'll settle for a rewarding educational experience and two hundred thousand dollars."
    Now how can you help admiring a man like that? Andy is one of those men who is ennobled and fettered by the higher qualities of life. That's not the case with most of the men you meet these days. If you stop a man on the street and offer him two hundred thousand dollars in cash, he'll probably take it from you, no questions asked, and not just for the experience. You try it tonight and see if I'm not right!
    Anyway, Andy began setting up his company and my mind began to wander down Larceny Lane, too. Oh, it wasn't so much that I wanted a profit as it was that I wanted a worthwhile educational experience. I was learning a lot and I wanted a chance to try it out. So, as I say, I wasn't so much interested in the experience as I was in the money.
    Then one day, while I was reading the local scandal-monger, I saw an article that warmed the cockleburrs of my heart and galvanized my instincts for commerce and fraud. It said that the U.S. Government was seeking new sources of uranium ore. That morning, I went out and leased the mineral rights on a piece of land. Then I went out and bought some mining supplies. Next, I went out to the lot I had just leased and put some of the latter into the former. Finally, I pinned an ad up on the Geology Department bulletin board at the school. And that afternoon, I created the Olentangy Land and Estate Company, Real and Imaginary, spearheaded by its peerless president, Mr. Jefferson Peters, the most insidious wallet masseur and metalsome mine synthesizer in the entire state of Ill-Repute. I know: it wasn't a big graft compared to the syndicates or the Internal Revenue Service, but after all, even the pharmaceutical companies had to start somewhere!
    That night, before I went to bed, I checked the weather forecast for the next day. It was a typical June forecast for Columbus: warm and sunny, with a 40% chance of sleet, followed by heavy snow.
    The next morning, a dark haired man left a Columbus building and walked west on 11th Avenue with a sinister bulge in his right pocket. He made his way to my lot, where he was joined by an indigent group of college rowdies.
    "Good morning, boys," said I, emptying my radiation-counter-and-geological-hammer pocket "I'm prepared to offer you some free money, provided you're willing to do a few chores to get it. My stratigraphic presumptions and geological dissimulations suggest that there could possibly be a mine-able vein of uranium ore directly underneath this site. I'm looking for a few intelligent and geologically trained men to explore the underground sub-surficial strata directly below this location, using this radiation counter as a guide and these picks and shovels as assessment instruments. I'll pay you $20.00 an hour, plus a sliding bonus that depends upon how fast this radiation counter clicks."
    The students responded to this challenging and exciting professional promise of big bucks in the enthusiastic way that I knew they would. After about ten minutes of moving like a tired turtle with a bad limp, they made the exciting discovery of traces of radioactivity located about seven or eight inches below the dig site. After that, they dug like gophers at a garbage dump. Oh, and it was idyllic to be out there on that beautiful June day, with the warm sun and the blue sky and all those busy students digging their way down to the water table! The student bodies knocked off at a quarter-to-lunch, and after they came back, they discovered some more radioactive dirt located about seven or eight inches below where they had been digging before lunch. I halted the geological research project at that point and paid them off. But first, I cautioned them against telling anybody about our possible uranium strike because we certainly wouldn't want to mislead anybody, would we? I asked them to let me know if they heard any rumors about this putative, hypothetical, phantasmagorical uranium strike. Then I called in a well drilling company and we pulled a twenty foot core sample out of that ground.
    After a few days, the price of land around there rose about thirty thousand dollars an acre. There was some silly rumor making the rounds that someone had discovered uranium in the neighborhood,
    One morning, about nine o'clock, one of the students called and told me that a professor from the Geology Department was on his way out to the dig site. I put on my Chase-Manhattan-gray suit and vest and my $79.95 you-can't-tell-it-from-a-Rolex and headed for Credibility Gap. The professor was already there when I arrived. He looked like a Philadelphia loan officer who has just been asked to approve a loan application submitted by the Easter Bunny.
    "What's this fantasy I've been hearing about a uranium strike here in Franklin County?" said he.
    "Oh, now don't tell me those students have been talking again!" said I. "And after I asked them not to! But as long as you're here, what besides radioactivity would make this radiation counter click the way it does?"
   He took the counter down in the hole and moved it around. It cackled like a New York taxi meter at 2 a.m., taking a rich widow for a ride.
    Then we talked for a while about how the glaciers had churned up the land and how they must have borne carnotite ore down from the Great Slave region of Canada and how some of it must have been left behind when the glaciers receded. We looked at the tailings from the mine and at the core I had taken from the twenty foot bore hole I had had drilled. Finally, he asked me if I needed any working capital to help develop the mine.
    "Oh, my, no!" said I. "It wouldn't be ethical of me to let anyone else invest his money in a mine that isn't certain to hit pay-dirt. For all I know, there might be nothing around that core sample but common clay. Anyway, venture capital can probably be arranged as soon as I get the deposit opened up a bit."
    In the end, he persuaded me to sell him 10% of the company's stock for $10,000.
    "One other thing, Mr. Peters," he said. "Let's not say anything to anybody about this for a few days. That will give us a little time to explore this situation more thoroughly before announcing our find to the public."
    So I agreed not to say anything about it. And I didn't.
    The next day, the rest of the Geology Department was down there with amused expressions of outraged incredibility on their faces.
    "Mr. Peters," said one, "we understand that you have sold one of the members of the Geology Department a partial interest in your alleged mine."
    "I have," said I, "and it's been bothering me all night. I have Prof. Fann's check right here and I want to buy back his stock as soon as he shows up. It isn't fair to let him risk his money in my mining venture at this early juncture."
    "Just what is it that makes you think you have discovered a mine-able pitchblende lode in a stratum of common Delaware limestone?" said another one, looking scornful and egregious.
    "Carnotite," said I, and I go into the same kriegspiel that I had mumbled the day before. When it was over, the Geology Department had signed up for 39% of the remaining stock at a price of $39,000, leaving me in control of 51% of the stock. I figured that was all right for openers. Now I could boost the price of the remaining stock and make a fair profit. But fate intervened.
    About eleven o'clock– a small man about five foot six or six foot five, of taller than average smallness but longer than he was tall, came up.
    "Where can I find Mr. Jefferson Peters?" said he.
    "I'm he," said I. "What can I do for you?"
    "I'm William Billings, from the School of Business Administration," said he. "Over the years, my brother and I have accumulated a little money. We want to buy the rest of this alleged mine that you've partially unloaded on the Geology Department."
    I looked at him. I went from his Blue-Light-Special shoes through his Factory-Direct-to-You suit to his Bargain-Days tie.
    "I can't take your savings," I said. "There's a slight chance that this investment might not triple your money in thirty days. Why don't you invest your money is something more conservative, like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Florida State Lottery or an abandoned gold mine in Flat Bush? Anyway," I went on, "if, conversely, the mine were to prove profitable and make you rich and maladjusted, I'd never forgive myself for it. Take the advice of an old financial peculator and drop your dough on a slow-rising bakery or a sound motion picture company or a stable horse parlor. Now why don't you run along before some boy named Jack comes up and sells you three beans for the price of a cow?"
    "Very funny!", said he. "All right. I'll ignore your words of opprobrium, since I suspect that you don't know what half of them mean. In the first place, although you know that there are two ounces of uranium ore in your pothole and I know that there are two ounces of uranium ore in your pothole, there are a lot of pea-brains in the neighborhood who would be willing to bet their last dollar that you and I are wrong. So the land I own around here has already appreciated enough in value to more than cover what I'm going to offer you for your hilariously worthless mining rights. In the second place, I suspect that some mop-head can be found skulking around here who'll be eager to buy me out at a small but extremely imprudent profit. For example, your fatuous fellow felons in the Geology Department might be willing to pay me off so they could have this synthetic salt cellar all to themselves. In the third place, once this mine is mine, even if no one else falls for this micro-mine scam, I can make enough depreciating it off my income tax and shorting the stock and taking depletion allowances and intangible drilling write-offs that the Federal Government will have to sell Connecticut to raise the money for my income tax refund. And let's face it, Mr. Peters, a man would have to look a long time to find a mine shaft with more depleted resources and less tangible drilling assets than this denatured sinkhole you've got here, now wouldn't he? Now, do you want to sell me those mineral rights or shall I call in a mining geologist with a garden trowel to desalinate this indented potato patch that you have defiled with the name 'uranium mine'?"
    "I can see that you need the land more than I do," said I, with a kindly smile. "I'll part with it for $51,000, the same price I charged the others. Make it in large bills, please. My knapsack is at the laundry."
    "So we repair to the nearest and most propinquitous bank, where he withdraws a wad of bills large enough to finance a Congressional fact-finding trip to Tahiti. He peels off about four ounces and swaps it for the signed and witnessed share certificates of the Olentangy Land and Estate Company.
    That afternoon, I told Andy what I had done.
    "Great!" he said. "I'm about to administer the coup de coupon to a sack-full of these sophisticated Scioto saps at a little stock raffle I'm holding at suppertime. But I need a shill to rotate the wheels of commerce. Could you drop by and invest 100,000 conservative dollars at the most auspicious moment?"
    "I can," I said.
    Later that evening, after we had gotten back to the our room, I said to Andy, "Since we've always made it a point of honor never to be present at a lynching, what would you say to skipping the official commencement frivolities and graduating before dark? It won't be long before some brash young geologist starts snooping around that mine, and I don't think he'll pull much of value out of it unless he digs up a leprechaun by accident. Besides, the Golden Goose has already laid so many golden eggs for us, it's beginning to look like fowl play."
    "All right," said Andy. "I've got to run a quick errand and then I'll be ready to go."
    Later that night, after we had romped over the state line, out of range of the wrath of the local rutabaga raisers, I said to Andy,
    "In what bank and under what name did you put our shill-gotten gains?"
    "Oh, I didn't put our $200,000 in the bank," said Andy. "That was one of the things they taught me in school. If you re-invest your money within six months after you sell your business, you don't have to pay income tax on it. That was what my errand was about. I'm making it work for us in the most reliable way you can invest your money today. I bought a controlling interest--51% of the stock--in a very promising company."
    "What's the name of this company?" said I, perceiving a slight cessation in my sensations of thought and foolhardiness.
    "The Olentangy Land and Estate Company," said Andy, "and I've got their share certificates right here to show for it."
    "So you can see how it was," said Jeff, sadly, reaching for another of my 2.00 cigars. "That's Andy's greatest weakness. His right hand never knows who his left hand is doing. His brain runs 14 days a week until it skids off the road."
    "I see," said I. I thought it best not to remind him that my name was also Billingsley, and that my brother's name is Bill. "By the way," I went on, endeavoring to redirect Jeff's train of thought down less-fractured tracks, "do you miss your former guide and mentor, the redoubtable O. Henry?"
    "Of course we do!" said Jeff. "Where would we be today without him?"
    "But you seem to have weathered his untimely departure," said I.
    "Yes," he said, sadly, "there's many a good man that has. But then, I guess it's like he said, 'Authors come and go, and poets go into bankruptcy, but me and Andy Tucker,'" said Jefferson Peters, "'go after the come-ons forever.'"