Answer:
The narrator’s friend suggested that the narrator ask Wheeler about Leonidas W. Smiley because he knew that Wheeler would tell a long story and waste the narrator's time.
Explanation:
As found in paragraph one of the short story, "I have a lurking
suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never
knew such a personage: and that he only conjectured that if I asked
old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim
Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some
exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should
be useless to me. If that was the design, it succeeded." The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain
