Text dependent questions

This is a frame story that sets the reader up for a "tall tale" in the form of a flashback. The narrator visits Simon Wheeler in a tavern in Angel’s Camp, Calaveras County, California, a gold-rush mining town. He calls on Wheeler at the request of his friend from back East to ask after the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. He finds Simon Wheeler dozing by the stove and describes him as old, fat, simple, and gentle. As Wheeler backs the narrator into a corner and launches into a series of tall tales about a completely different man named Jim Smiley, the narrator suspects that his friend made up Leonidas as a pretext to entrap him into listening to Wheeler’s “long and tedious” stories.