Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford

A pair of velvet-gloved swindlers, Wallingford and his jaunty shadow Chester, drift into a sleep-sweet hamlet like autumn leaves heavy with gold dust, brandishing nothing more than a grin and the rumor of money. They promise a renaissance: a humming cathedral of industry that will forge carpet tacks—tiny iron prayers for a town that has forgotten the smell of wages. Shares are christened with champagne optimism; church bells echo the clang of future prosperity. Yet behind the silk curtains the ledger is a blank psalm, the factory a stage set of humming nonsense. When jittery stockholders sniff brimstone, Wallingford pirouettes into sermons of manifest destiny, knotting doubt into belief with the ease of a magician tying a cherry stem inside his mouth. Just as the last skeptical eyelid surrenders, a telegram arrives—a white-gloved angel offering to buy out the mirage. The con men’s victory inhale tastes of mint and ozone, but the offer itself is a mirror within a mirror: perhaps salvation, perhaps the coup de grâce of a bigger hustle, leaving the town—and the audience—swaying in the afterglow of a confidence so radiant it feels like sunrise.