Wednesday night thirty policemen were on duty at Madison Square Garden, Acting Captain O'Hara of the West Thirtieth Street Station being in command. Over the telephone to headquarters O'Hara, at eight-thirty, reported that his tally accounted for two hundred and eighty-one persons present. Congressman Mallard, he stated, had not arrived yet, but was momentarily expected.
At eight-forty-five O'Hara telephoned again. Congressman Mallard had just sent word that he was ill and would not be able to speak. This message had been brought by Professor Rascovertus, the former college professor, who had come in a cab and had made the bare announcement to those on hand and then had driven away. The assembled two hundred and eighty-one had heard the statement in silence and forthwith had departed in a quiet and orderly manner. O'Hara asked permission to send his men back to the station house.
Congressman Mallard returned to Washington on the midnight train, his secretary accompanying him. Outwardly he did not bear himself like a sick man, but on his handsome face was a look which the secretary had never before seen on his employer's face. It was the look of a man who asks himself a question over and over again.
On Thursday, in conspicuous type, black faced and double-leaded, there appeared on the front page and again at the top of the editorial column of every daily paper, morning and evening, in the United States, and in every weekly and every monthly paper whose date of publication chanced to be Thursday, the following paragraph:
"There is a name which the press of America no longer prints. Let every true American, in public or in private, cease hereafter from uttering that name."
Invariably the caption over this paragraph was the one word:
SILENCE!
One week later, to the day, the wife of one of the richest men in America died of acute pneumonia at her home in Chicago. Practically all the daily papers in America carried notices of this lady's death; the wealth of her husband and her own prominence in social and philanthropic affairs justified this. At greater or at less length it was variously set forth that she was the niece of a former ambassador to the Court of St. James; that she was the national head of a great patriotic organisation; that she was said to have dispensed upward of fifty thousand dollars a year in charities; that she was born in such and such a year at such and such a place; that she left, besides a husband, three children and one grandchild; and so forth and so on.
But not a single paper in the United States stated that she was the only sister of Congressman Jason Mallard.
The remainder of this account must necessarily be in the nature of a description of episodes occurring at intervals during a period of about six weeks; these episodes, though separated by lapses of time, are nevertheless related.