Saturday night, however, saw no late extras. The “story” was too big to touch without something more tangible than the word of even so substantial a man as Gerald Fosland; and long before any of the twelve eager young gentlemen had reached the office, the scout brigade, hundreds strong, were sniffing over every trail and yelping over every scent.
They traced the visiting diplomats from the time they had stepped down their respective gangplanks to the time they walked up them again. They besieged and bombarded and beleaguered the eight members of the International Transportation Company, or as many of them as they could locate, and they even found their way out to Gerald Fosland’s yacht, in mad pursuit of Eldridge Babbitt. Here, however, they were foiled, for Gerald, ordering the anchor hoist at the first hail, stepped out on the deck from his belated dinner, and informed the gentlemen of the press that the rights of hospitality on his yacht would be held inviolate, whereupon he headed for Sandy Hook. The scout brigade were also unable to locate Joseph G. Clark, the only multi-millionaire in America able to crawl in a hole and pull the hole in after him, Robert E. Taylor, who never permitted anybody but a personal friend to speak to him from dinner time on, and Edward E. Allison, of whom there had been no trace since noon. They might just as well not have found the others, for neither Chisholm, nor Haverman, nor Grandin, nor Vance, could be induced to make any admissions, be trapped into a yes or no, or grunt in the wrong place. They had grown up with the art of interviewing, and had kept one lap ahead of it, in obedience to nature’s first law, which, as every school boy knows, though older people may have forgotten it, is the law of self-preservation.
Until three o’clock in the morning every newspaper office in New York was a scene of violent gloom. Throughout all the city, and into many outside nooks and crannies, were hundreds of human tentacles, burrowing like moles into the sandy soil of news, but unearthing nothing of any value. The world’s biggest sensation was in those offices, and they couldn’t touch it with a pair of tongs! Nor were libel suits, or any such trivial considerations, in the minds of the astute managers of the free and entirely uncurbed. The deterrent was that the interests involved were so large that one might as well sit on a keg of gunpowder and light it, as to make the slightest of errors. The gentlemen mentioned as the organisers of the International Transportation Company collectively owned about all the money, and all the power, and all the law, in the gloriously independent United States of America; and if they got together on any one subject, such as the squashing of a newspaper, for instance, something calm and impressive was likely to happen. On the other hand, if the interesting story the free and entirely uncurbed had in its possession were true, the squashing would be reversed, and the freeness and entirely uncurbedness would be still more firmly seated than ever, which is the palladium of our national liberties; and Heaven be good to us.
It was a distressing evening. Whole reams of copy, more throbbing than any fiction, more potent than any explosion, more consequential than any war, hung on the “hold” hooks, and grew cold! Whole banks of galleys of the same gorgeous stuff stood on the racks, set and revised, and ready to be plated, and not a line of it could be released!
Towards morning there was an army of newspaper men so worried and distressed, and generally consumed with the mad passion of restraint, that there was scarcely a fingernail left in the profession, and frightened-eyed copy boys hid behind doors. Suddenly a dozen telegraph operators, in as many offices, jumped from their desks, as if they had all been touched at the same instant by a powerful current from their instruments, and shouted varying phrases, a composite of which would be nearest expressed by:
“Let ’er go!”
It had been eight o’clock in the evening in New York when Gerald Fosland had first given out his information, and at that moment it was one A.M. in Berlin. At three A.M., Berlin time, which was ten P.M. in New York, the Baron von Slachten, who had been detained by an unusual stress of diplomatic business, strolled to his favourite café. At three-five, the Baron von Slachten became the most thought about man in his city, but the metropolitan press of Berlin is slightly fettered and more or less curbed, and there are certain formalities to be observed. It is probable, therefore, that the Baron might have gone about his peaceful way for two or three days, had not a fool American, in the advertising branch of one of the New York papers, in an entire ignorance of decent formalities, walked straight out Unter den Linden, to Baron von Slachten’s favourite café, and, picking out the Baron at a table with four bushy-faced friends, made this cheerful remark, in the manner and custom of journalists in his native land:
“Well, Baron, the International Transportation Company has confessed. Could you give me a few words on the subject?”
The Baron, who had been about to drink a stein of beer, set down his half liter and stared at the young man blankly. His face turned slowly yellow, and he rose.
“Lass bleiben,” the Baron ordered the handy persons who were about to remove the cheerful advertising representative and incarcerate him for life, and then the Baron walked stolidly out of the café, and rode home, and wrote for an hour or so, and ate a heavy early breakfast, and returned to his study, and obligingly shot himself.