“His part was to seek the truth in the whirling incidents of the moment. With what complete absorption and self-forgetfulness he gave himself to the task, you know better than I. Perhaps you do not know, as I did not until after his death, that he clung to his appointed work against the ravages of a slow, pain-racked and mortal illness. The great Master of Destiny whose universe proceeds by immutable laws has seen no priest of old called to martyrdom, no prophet risen to warn the nations, no discoverer inspired to enlarge the ken of mankind, with a truer vocation than the seeker in a lesser field whom we honour here.
“He has gone to his own place. Whether he still seeks or has found, is not for us. For us is the legacy of a single-minded devotion and a straightforward nobility of character that cannot but have made and left its impress wherever exerted.”
How strangely work the influences of sympathy! The reporters who listened with warming hearts to the simple man of science had come to Haynes’ funeral primarily as a mark of respect, but secondarily because of their interest in a remarkable “story.” Whispers of the professor’s pteranodon theory had passed about. One or two of the men besides McDale of the “yellow,” had questioned him shrewdly, and had seen that he would commit himself to that theory. This meant a big sensation. The practice of journalism tends to dwarf the imagination and to make men skeptical of all that lies beyond the bounds of the usual. Not one of the reporters there took the slightest stock in the theory of a prehistoric monster. Nevertheless, the mere word of a man so eminent in the scientific world as the entomologist would be enough to “carry the story,” and make it a tremendous feature. Columns of space were in it. But it meant also, as every reporter there believed, the downfall of Professor Ravenden’s repute in a cataract of ridicule. As soon as the newspaper group re-gathered at Third House, McDale spoke.
“I’m going to do what I never expected to do,” he said. “I’m going to throw my paper down.”
“On the Ravenden story?” asked Eldon Smith.
McDale nodded gloomily. “It would have been such a screamer!” he said, shaking his head. “But it goes to the scrap-heap. Not for mine—after that little sermon.”
“I think we’re all agreed, fellows,” said Chal-loner of the Morning Script, the dean of the gathering. “We all feel alike, I guess, about Professor Ravenden. I’ve heard funeral sermons by the greatest in the country; but nothing that ever came home to me personally. Now, if we print this pter-anodon story and back it up with interviews, it’s a big thing; but where does the professor come in? We’ve got to save him from himself. The pter-anodon feature has got to be suppressed. Is that understood?”
There was no dissent. In all the days while the reporters stayed about waiting for the “news interest” to peter out of the mystery, not one hint of the professor’s “wild theory” found its way into print.
As time passed with no new developments, the reporters dropped in one by one to say good-bye to Professor Ravenden before they took train for New York. Since then the professor often has had cause to wonder why, whenever he has spoken in public, the newspapers all over the country have treated him with such marked consideration, often overshadowing the utterances of more prominent speakers with his. He does not know how small is the world of journalism and how widely and swiftly travels “inside news.”
Of the newspaper crowd, Eldon Smith was the last to leave. He had a talk with Dick Colton, who rode over to the train with him.