He handed the slip to his chief, who ran his eye over the message. The words employed were few, but a journalist of McMurtrie's experience instinctively covered the bare bones with a respectable integument, and clothed this with a quite picturesque raiment by force of the more ornamental parts of speech.
The substance of what he read was as follows: A cable message had reached San Francisco from Honolulu in the afternoon of the previous day, announcing that an aeroplane had alighted there about three o'clock that morning, the owner, a Lieutenant Thistleton (so it was corrupted) Smith declaring that he had come from Samoa in sixteen hours, and was proceeding to San Francisco. He had left three hours later, having waited only to take in a stock of petrol. On receipt of this message the editor of every newspaper in the city had arranged for a relay of reporters to be up all night and watch for the arrival of this extraordinary machine. Shortly after midnight the hum of the propellers was heard over Golden Gate, and a light in the sky indicating the course of the aeroplane, a dozen journalists, in motor-cars, rushed after it, but were hopelessly out-distanced. They discovered it on the outskirts of the city. The airmen had already landed. The reporter who was first in the race seized upon Lieutenant Smith, and learning that he had only alighted to obtain more petrol, rushed him back to the city in his car. His comrades and competitors, on arriving, sought to interview the second man, whose name they had not been able to ascertain; but he was very uncommunicative, being occupied in cleaning the engine. Lieutenant Smith was back with petrol in twenty minutes; in half-an-hour he was again on his way. This extreme haste caused great disappointment to the airmen and civic dignitaries of the city, they having risen from their beds on hearing of his arrival to honour Lieutenant Smith with a reception. When they reached the spot where he had descended, he had been gone some ten minutes. In the race to meet him, one of the motor-cars collided with an electric-light standard and was overturned, its occupant, Mr. Aeneas T. Muckleridge, being carried to hospital in a critical condition. Several San Francisco newspapers had published interviews with Lieutenant Smith, one of them ten columns long.
Mr. McMurtrie chuckled as he read this dispatch in the shorthand of the news agency.
"Bedad, 'tis worth a special editorial, Daniels. But why didn't we get it before, man? It ought to have been in time for the morning papers."
"You remember, sir, there's been something wrong with the line to-day through the storm."
"So there has, indeed. Well, take out that stuff about the new British tariff, and send Davis in to me."
He went into his room, sat back in his chair, pushed up his golfing cap, and smiled as he meditated the periods of his editorial. In a few moments a thin, ragged-headed youth entered with an air of haste and terror. He carried a paper-block, which he set on his knee, looking anxiously at the editor. Mr. McMurtrie began to dictate, the stenographer's pencil flying over the paper as he sought to overtake the rapid utterance of his chief. The article, as it appeared on the second page of the Sphere an hour later, ran as follows:
HOCUS POCUS
A hoax, or as our merry ancestors would have called it, a flam, is usually the most ephemeral and evanescent of human devices. Like a boy's soap bubble, it glitters for a brief moment in iridescent rotundity, then ceases to be even a film of air. It is unsubstantial as the tail of Halley's comet. On rare occasions, it is true, its existence is prolonged; many worthy people are beguiled; and some enthusiasts are so effectually hoodwinked as to persist in their delusion, and even to form societies for its propagation. But mankind at large is sufficiently sane to avoid a fall into this abyss of the absurd, and, having paid its tribute of laughter, goes its way without being a cent the worse.
San Francisco appears to be the latest victim of The Great Aviation Hoax, and we shall watch the progressive stages of its disillusionment with sympathetic interest, or the development of its newest cult with sincere commiseration. Like many other phenomena, good and bad, this gigantic flam, it will be remembered, took its rise in the east. Its genesis was reported in Constantinople nearly a week ago: then at intervals we learnt that these mysterious airmen, one of whom with artful artlessness had adopted the plain, respectable, and specious name of Smith, had manifested themselves at Karachi, Penang, and Port Darwin successively. The curtain then dropped, and the world waited with suspense for the opening of the next act, though there were some who suspected that the performers had slipped away with the cash-box during the interval, and would never be heard of again. However, the curtain has at last rung up at the golden city of the west, and it is certainly a mark of the ingenuity of the concocters of the hoax that they allowed at least twenty-four hours for the passage of the Pacific. In another column we give an account of a visit to San Francisco, in the small hours of this morning, from which it will be seen that the city fathers narrowly escaped making themselves ridiculous, the flying men having wisely disappeared before the municipal deputation, hastily summoned from their beds, had time to make the indispensable changes in their attire. It need scarcely be hinted that there are many accomplished aviators in San Francisco who would take a jovial pleasure in lending themselves to this amusing hoax, if only for the chance of seeing their most reverend seniors in pyjamas.