“There are but two in existence,” said Koshloff soberly. “This one belongs to our Ambassador at Washington. It was sent to me for use in receiving the imperial message. The other—is in the possession of the Czar, and will be worn by the receiving courier at St. Petersburg. The penalty attaching to the loss of the pin, either to myself or my agents are—well, they are somewhat stringent and, with the single exception of Carlos, have always been enforced.”
Lanagan snapped the patent clasp and handed the pin to Koshloff.
“You see, if I lost it,” with the slightest inflection on the pronoun, “there would be no Czar of this ‘particular bailiwick’ to pardon me as you pardoned Carlos, Mr. Koshloff.”
We walked the long distance back to town and dropped in at ——. Lanagan had not addressed a word to me. I knew better than to attempt to draw him into conversation. I could feel that he was working the thing over and over again in his mind. He suddenly burst forth passionately:
“I could have beaten them! I could have beaten them! And they didn’t convince me at that, that the story should not have been printed! There’s too much of this one-man-for-the-nation stuff in our government, anyhow.”
It was months before Lanagan told me that it was because of my wife’s feeble health that he feared to take the risk of having us both bottled up for a month, by manœuvring further for freedom; and had added: “Merely another argument to prove that your true reporter should not marry.”
And as if to justify the truth of Lanagan’s assertion to me that the story should have been printed, within three days the Japanese fleet, scorpion-like, had struck and crippled that unsuspecting and unready Russian flotilla.
“Yah!” Lanagan had cried to me in furious disgust, as he ripped the front page of the Enquirer with its seven-column war head to tatters, “Statesmen! Diplomats! Give me one live reporter, and I’ll teach the whole gang of them the right way! Do you suppose for one single, solitary, coruscating second, that if those Japs knew the Secretary was hobnobbing with the Russian envoy right here in San Francisco, that the blow would have been struck? Well, I tell you No! I wouldn’t even have had to print the message. The story of the meeting was enough.”
Well, the time limit set by the Secretary has long since expired, so here is the suppressed story of the Ambassador’s Stick-Pin, the finest, biggest, cleanest in its elements of any of his whole career, as Lanagan mourned to me more than once.