"Me?" McGinity answered. "Oh, I feel as if I'd fallen down a couple of flights of stairs."
"I've seen great revelations in my time," I remarked, "but this is the most triumphant—" I stopped. The reporter's rather cryptic remark was puzzling me. I glanced at him quizzically. He did not look right, somehow; too much gravity and anxiousness in his pose and countenance, considering this crowning moment in his life. "Something displeased you?" I inquired. "You look worried."
His reply, though vague, immediately aroused my curiosity. "I'd like to see you, alone—tonight—after we return to the castle," he said, in a low voice. "I want to talk over something with you."
That ended our conversation. He excused himself, and hurried away to telephone to the Recorder. Newspapers, not only in New York but throughout the country, and the rest of the world as well, were prepared to devote columns to the momentous event; far more important, to my mind, than the radio message from Mars, and the landing of the Martian rocket, with its strange passenger, for here were actual revelations direct from the planet, proving conclusively that it was inhabited by human beings, who were subject to the same laws, the same temptations and passions which affect ordinary humanity.
It was amusing to see the small regiment of reporters present, rushing off to their different papers to write their stories, as soon as the picture had faded from the screen. McGinity, being more advantageously placed, was ahead of the rest of them in that he had filed his story for the Daily Recorder earlier in the evening. After he had telephoned to his office, and given word for its release, and told what had happened at the banquet table, excerpts from the speeches, etceteras, he was free to accompany us to Sands Cliff.
He had something to tell me. What? It might be nothing, and it might be a good deal. The time of surmising came to its end. Within a few minutes after our arrival at the castle, we were closeted together in his apartment. Middle of the night though it was, I felt excited and bouyant, and filled with a sense of adventure. Lighting a cigar, I settled down in an easy chair, and waited.
The reporter walked up and down the room with his hands plunged deep in his trousers' pockets, and his head bent downwards. He appeared to be tracing the designs in the rug beneath his restless feet. Suddenly, he pulled himself out of his concentrated mental effort, stopped dead, and turned to me.
"Mr. Royce," he said, "do you believe all this stuff that's been happening?"
"Yes," I replied, promptly. "That is, in a way. Why, what do you think?"
For a moment he stood gazing at me in silence, intently. Then he asked: "I wonder if you think what I think?"