“What’s going on?” he asked.

The barker appraised him with one sweeping glance.

“Stereopticon lecture inside,” he snapped, and turned his back.

Bob made his way into a dimly lighted hall.  At one end was a slightly elevated platform above which the white screen was suspended.  More agricultural products supplied the decorations.  The body of the hall was filled with folding chairs, about half of which were occupied.  Perhaps a dozen attendants tiptoed here and there.  A successful attempt was everywhere made to endow with high importance all the proceedings and appurtenances of the Lucky Land Co.

Bob slipped into a chair.  Immediately a small pasteboard ticket and a fountain pen were thrust into his hand.

“Sign your name and address on this,” the man whispered.

Bob held it up, the better to see what it was.

“All these tickets are placed in a hat,” explained the man, “and one is drawn.  The lucky ticket gets a free ride to Lucky on one of our weekly homeseekers’ excursions.  Others pay one fare for round trip.”

“I see,” said Bob, signing, “and in return you get the names and addresses of every one here.”

He glanced up at his interlocutor with a quizzical expression that changed at once to one of puzzlement.  Where had he seen the man before?  He was, perhaps, fifty-five years old, tall and slender, slightly stooped, slightly awry.  His lean gray face was deeply lined, his close-clipped moustache and hair were gray, and his eyes twinkled behind his glasses with a cold gray light.  Something about these glasses struck faintly a chord of memory in Bob’s experience, but he could not catch its modulations.  The man, on his side, stared at Bob a trifle uncertainly.  Then he held the card up to the dim light.

“You are interested in Lucky Lands—­Mr. John Smith, of Reno?” he asked, stooping low to be heard.

“Sure!” grinned Bob.

The man said nothing more, but glided away, and in a moment the flare of light on the screen announced that the lecture was to begin.

The lecturer, was a glib, self-possessed youth, filled to the brim with statistics, with which he literally overwhelmed his auditors.  His remarks were accompanied by a rapid-fire snapping of fingers to the time of which the operator changed his slides.  A bewildering succession of coloured views flashed on the screen.  They showed Lucky in all its glories—­the blacksmith shop, the main street, the new hotel, the grocery, Brown’s walnut ranch, the ditch, the Southern Pacific Depot, the Methodist Church and a hundred others.  So quickly did they succeed each other that no one had time to reduce to the terms of experience the scenes depicted on these slides—­for with the glamour of exaggerated colour, of unaccustomed presentation, and of skillful posing the most commonplace village street seems wonderful and attractive for the moment.  The lecturer concluded by an alarming statement as to the rapidity with which this desirable ranching property was being snapped up.  He urged early decisions as the only safe course; and, as usual with all real estate men, called attention to the contrast between the Riverside of twenty years ago and the Riverside of to-day.