For many a long day politicians and papers continued the search for “the motive.” Styles and his crowd saw it as a simple matter of selling out; they knew, of course, that it could be nothing else. After their first rage had subsided, and they saw there was nothing they could do, they wondered, sneeringly, why he did not “fix up a better story.” That was a little too simple-minded. Did he think people were fools? And even the men who profited by the situation puzzled their brains for weeks trying to understand it. There was something behind it, of course.
XI. — HIS AMERICA
He hated to see the reporter go. With the closing of that door it seemed certain that there was no putting it off any longer.
But even when the man's footsteps were at last sounding on the stairway, he still clung to him.
“Father,” he asked, fretfully, “why do you always talk to those fellows?”
Herman Beckman turned in his chair and stared at his son. Then he laughed. “Now, that's a fine question to come from the honour man of a law school! I hope, Fritz, that your oration to-night is going to have a little more sense in it than that.”
The calling up of his oration made him reach out another clutching hand to the vanished reporter. “But it's farcical, father, to be always interviewed by a paper nobody reads.”
“Nobody—reads?”