back to earth and cut out the tongue of anybody who tells". In More Adventures of the Great Brain, the people of Adenville, including Papa and Uncle Mark, believe that a prehistoric animal is on the loose due to "monster tracks" leading from Skeleton Cave to the river and back. In reality, Tom has created those tracks to scare Parley Benson away from the cave and win a bet. Later in the same book, Tom, John, Sweyn, and several of their friends encounter a ghost in the abandoned mining town of Silverlode; the "ghost" is really the uncle of one of their friends dressed in a sheet, for the purpose of scaring them away from the very real physical dangers of that place. In Me and My Little Brain, John scares Frankie with a story about a ghost who comes to eat children, but is repelled by those who sleep in their own beds, in an attempt to get Frankie to stop sleeping in his bed. In The Great Brain at the Academy, Tom and his friend Jerry win a bet by making it appear that Jerry can read minds, inspired by the boys being taken to a carnival by the priests and seeing a professional sideshow act of a magician. Tom later reveals how the real magician and his assistant pulled off the trick. In The Great Brain Does It Again, Tom has Herbie Sties, the "greedy gut", take a "sacred oath" on the Bible to "stop eating ice cream and candy and more than one dessert a day", declaring that "if I break my sacred vow, my soul will belong to the Devil and I'll burn in everlasting Hell". When Herbie still does not lose even one pound, Tom and John investigate and secretly observe him consuming a bag-load of candy. Rather than denounce him on the spot, Tom has John dress up in a devil costume and knock on Herbie's window as he is getting ready for bed. Herbie believes for five days that a devil really has come to claim his soul, although the trick is eventually revealed. Crime. The author details various crimes that took place in Utah, but in one book explains that 20th Century Hollywood distorted the image of American West as a place of anarchy and lawlessness, which was not quite true due to the law enforcement of those days. In many