To load a frog with shot so that it cannot engage in a jumping match is amusing. Beyond the obvious laugh, however, the slyness with which the defeat of the champion frog is managed seems to be an indication of Mark Twain’s interest in championing frontier common sense. It is not really an endorsement of cheating or deception in a malicious sense. The narrator’s casual reference to an Eastern friend is followed by an indulgently superior description of Simon Wheeler. Wheeler’s winning gentleness and simplicity are of primary importance to the author. This disparity establishes Twain’s dislike of the affectations and hypocrisy of the East, a dislike he readily contrasts with the informality and openness of the West. If the similarities of dramatic situation at the outset of the tale seem to indicate a familiar story line—the country stooge bested by the polished urbanite—the story upsets these calculations. The narrator, as things turn out, is not as clever as he sees himself. Assuming that he is more sophisticated than the man he meets, the encounter teaches him just the reverse—it is he, not Simon Wheeler, who is simple. The innocence of Simon Wheeler’s expression is a mask that he assumes to deceive the outsider by seeming to fulfill all his preconceived notions of Western simplemindedness.