“Wait!” he called. “Say, hold on! Stop! I won’t do this at all. I don’t agree to this!” but now it was too late. In a trice the prisoner, officers, Collins and even himself were up the two or three low steps of the main entrance and into the hall, and then seeing the hopelessness of it he paused as they entered the elevator and was left to meditate on the inexplicability of the thing that had been done to him.
What was it? How had this low brute succeeded in doing this to him? By the Lord, he had succeeded in hypnotizing him, or something very much like it. What had become, then, of his superior brain, his intellectual force, in the face of this gross savage desire on the part of Collins to win? It was unbelievable. Collins had beaten him, and that in a field and at a task at which he deemed himself unusually superior.
“Great heavens!” he suddenly exclaimed to himself. “That’s what he’s done, he’s beaten me at my own game! He’s taken the prisoner, whom I really had in my own hands at one time, into the office of our great rival, and now in the morning it will all be in the paper! And I allowed him to do it! And I had him beaten, too! Why didn’t I kick him off the train? Why didn’t I bribe the conductor to help me? I could have. I was afraid of him, that’s what it is. And to-morrow there’ll be a long editorial in the News telling how this fellow was brought first to the News and photographed, and they’ll have his picture to prove it. Oh, Lord, what shall I do? How am I to get out of this?”
Disconsolate and weary, he groaned and swore for blocks as he made his way toward the office of the Star. How to break it to Waxby! How to explain! The exact truth meant disgrace, possibly dismissal. He couldn’t tell really, as he had hoped he might, how he had all but prevented Collins from obtaining any interview. Waxby would have sniffed at his weakness in a crisis, put him down as a failure.
Reaching the office, he told another kind of story which was but a half truth. What he could and did say was that the police, being temperamentally en rapport with Collins, had worked with him and against the Star; that in spite of anything he could do, these rural officers and detectives had preferred to follow Collins rather than himself, that the superior position of the News had lured them, and that against his final and fierce protest they had eventually gone in there, since the News was on the natural route to the jail, and the Star was not.
Now it was Waxby’s turn to rage, and he did—not at Binns, but at the low dogs of police who were always favoring the News at the expense of the Star. They had done it in the past, as he well knew, when he was city editor of the News. Then it had pleased him—but now——
“I’ll fix them!” he squeaked shrilly. “I’ll make them sweat. No more favors from me, by——,” and rushing a photographer to the jail he had various pictures made, excellent ones, for that matter—only, what was the good? The fact that the News had the honor of making the first picture of this celebrity under its own roof, its own vine and fig-tree, was galling. As a matter of fact, Waxby by now was blaming himself for not having sent an artist along.
But to Binns the sad part was that Collins had him beaten, and that in the face of his self-boasted superiority. In spite of the fact that he might slave over the text, as he did, giving it, because of his despair and chagrin, all his best touches, still, the next morning, there on the front page of the News, was a large picture of the bandit seated in the sanctum sanctorum of the News, entirely surrounded by reporters and editors, and with a portion of the figure, although not the head, of the publisher himself in the background. And over it all in extra large type was the caption:
“LOAN TRAIN ROBBER VISITS OFFICE OF NEWS TO PAY HIS RESPECTS” while underneath, in italics, was a full account of how willingly he had visited the News because of its immense commercial, moral and other forms of superiority.
Was Binns beaten?