Walla Walla, May 7.
"This morning, at ten o'clock, the station Swallowtown, on the Oregon line, was surprised by bandits. They captured the station in order to hold up the express train to Umatilla. The plot was frustrated by the decisive action of the station official, who jumped on the passing train and warned the passengers. Unfortunately, the robbers succeeded in escaping, but the Umatilla police have started in pursuit. The majority of the bandits are said to have been Japanese."
In these words the attack on Swallowtown was wired to New York, and when John Halifax went to the office of the New York Daily Telegraph at midnight, to work up the telegrams which had come in during Sunday for the morning paper, his chief drew his attention in particular to the remark at the end of the message, and asked him to make some reference in his article to the dangers of the Japanese immigration, which seemed to be going on unhindered over the Mexican and Canadian frontiers. John Halifax would have preferred to comment editorially on the necessity of night rest for newspaper men, but settled down in smothered wrath to write up the highwaymen who had committed the double crime of desecrating the Sabbath and robbing the train.
But scarcely had he begun his article under the large headlines "Japanese Bandits—A Danger no longer Confined to the Frontier, but Stalking about in the Heart of the Country,"—he was just on the point of setting off Tom's brave deed against the rascality of the bandits, when another package of telegrams was laid on the table. He was going to push them irritably aside when his glance fell on the top telegram, which began with the words, "This morning at ten o'clock the station at Connell, Wash., was attacked by robbers, who——"
"Hm!" said John Halifax, "there seems to be some connection here, for they probably meant to hold up the express at Connell, too." He turned over a few more telegrams; the next message began: "This morning at eleven o'clock—" and the two following ones: "This morning at twelve o'clock—" They all reported the holding up of trains, which had in almost every instance been successful. John Halifax got up, and with the bundle of telegrams went over to the map hanging on the wall and marked with a pencil the places where the various attacks had taken place. The result was an irregular line through the State of Washington running from north to south, along which the train robbers, apparently working in unison, had begun their operations at the same time. Nowhere had it been possible to capture them.
John Halifax threw his article into the waste basket and began again with the headlines, "A Gang of Train-Robbers at Work in Washington," and then gave a list of the places where the gang had held up the trains. He wrote a spirited article, which closed with a warning to the police in Washington and Oregon to put an end to this state of affairs as soon as possible, and if necessary to call upon the militia for aid in catching the bandits. While Halifax was writing, the news was communicated from the electric bulletin-board to the people hurrying through the streets at that late hour.
John Halifax read the whole story through once more with considerable satisfaction, and was pleased to think that the New York Daily Telegraph would treat its readers Monday morning to a thoroughly sensational bit of news. When he had finished, it struck him that all these attacks had been directed against trains running from west to east, and that the train held up at Swallowtown was the only one going in the opposite direction. He intended in conclusion to add a suggestive remark about this fact, but it slipped out of his mind somehow, and, yawning loudly, he threw his article as it was into the box near his writing table, touched a button, and saw the result of his labors swallowed noiselessly by a small lift. Then the author yawned again, and, going over to his chief, reported that he had finished, wished him a gruff "good morning," and started on his way home.
As he left the newspaper offices he observed the same sight that had met his eyes night after night for many years—a crowd of people standing on the opposite side of the street, with their heads thrown back, staring up at the white board upon which, in enormous letters, appeared the story of how Tom, with his bold leap, had saved the train. The last sentence, explaining that the robbers had been recognized as Japanese, elicited vigorous curses against the "damned Japs."
High up in the air the apparatus noiselessly and untiringly flashed forth one message after the other in big, black letters on the white ground—telling of one train attack after another. But of that living machine in the far West, working with clocklike regularity and slowly adding one link after the other to the chain, that machine which at this very moment had already separated three of the States by an impenetrable wall from the others and had thus blotted out three of the stars on the blue field of the Union flag—of that uncanny machine neither John Halifax nor the people loitering opposite the newspaper building in order to take a last sensation home with them, had the remotest idea. Not till the next morning was the meaning of these first flaming signs to be made clear.