In Section 2, Jack Halliday—the voice of the Hadleyburg commoners in Twain's story—wanders, bewildered, through the village: the nineteen prominent citizens of Hadleyburg appear to be in some indescribable state of joy, just days after they were frozen by some equally mysterious sadness. In a moment of bitter satire, Halliday assumes that this happiness must come from someone else's suffering:
When Halliday found the duplicate ecstasy in the face of “Shadbelly” Billson (village nickname), he was sure some neighbor of Billson’s had broken his leg, but inquiry showed that this had not happened. The subdued ecstasy in Gregory Yates’s face could mean but one thing—he was a mother-in-law short: it was another mistake. “And Pinkerton—Pinkerton—he has collected ten cents that he thought he was going to lose.” And so on, and so on.
The Nineteen's mood has been elevated by the arrival of a second letter, claiming that each is the sole rightful claimant to the sack of gold that has arrived in Hadleyburg, but Halliday is unaware of this development. His humorous—if awful—assumptions about the cause of this joy reveal what the reader suspects but has not yet been able to confirm: that the nineteen prominent citizens of Hadleyburg are morally bankrupt, and can only derive their pleasure from their peers' pain. It is this reality that the stranger who dropped off the gold in Hadleyburg hopes to uncover—by finally denying the Nineteen their claim to their sole redeemable virtue, their honesty.
In Section 2, Edward Richards is the first citizen to receive a follow-up letter from a "Howard L. Stephenson." In the letter, this Stephenson details how Goodson had originally made the remark that was so worthy of the mysterious "gold," but adds that Richards—by virtue of some unnamed favor for Goodson—is his "legitimate heir." In a fit of angst, Richards wracks his brain to remember this apparent favor. Perhaps, Richards wonders, he had saved the stranger's life? The reader is, by now, well aware that Richards has no actual claim to the gold, and Twain captures Richard's cognitive somersaults with his trademark satire and hyperbole:
His life? That is it! Of course. Why, he might have thought of it before. This time he was on the right track, sure. His imagination-mill was hard at work in a minute, now.
Thereafter during a stretch of two exhausting hours he was busy saving Goodson’s life. He saved it in all kinds of difficult and perilous ways. In every case he got it saved satisfactorily up to a certain point; then, just as he was beginning to get well persuaded that it had really happened, a troublesome detail would turn up which made the whole thing impossible.
The way Twain has written this passage, Richards spends the evening actually saving Goodson's life, over and over. This hyperbole is a classic method by which Twain teases out satire from his narrative: by his description, Richards's clumsy attempts to prove himself the rightful heir to the gold become even more painful to behold.
This passage is a wonderful example of the thematic conflict between vanity and virtue on display throughout "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg": Richards is desperate to claim the money, and vain enough to believe he has earned it—so his only recourse is to fabricate a memory of his supposed virtuousness. Satire is the main—and most effective—mechanism by which Twain lays bare the hypocrisy of this behavior and the behavior of Richards's fellow citizens.
