And then Peter Nagle brought up his favorite hobby, in the form of a poem mildly satirizing God. There was some question as to the wisdom of bringing in the religious issue, but Peter asserted his prerogatives as editor; either he was or he wasn’t, and if he was, then he took his stand upon the Russian formula, “Religion is the opium of the people.” Billy George backed him up, insisting that the new paper should cover the whole field of modern thought.
Well, The Investigator was written, and edited, and set up into galleys, and pasted on a dummy, and then cut up and pasted differently. At last it was printed; there lay the sheets, fresh from the press, soft and damp, like locusts newly emerged from the chrysalis. Next day they would be dry; and meantime, “Ssh! Not a word!”
How were the papers to be distributed? There had been much discussion. Bunny, with his lordly ideas, wanted to give them away. But Rachel brought word from her father, the tailor, who was also literature agent for Local Angel City of the Socialist party, that the papers must be sold; people wouldn’t respect them otherwise. “What they pay good money for they will read,” said Papa Menzies, with proper Jewish insight; and his daughter added, with proper Socialist fervor, “If we really believe in our cause, we won’t mind a little ridicule.” It was a call to martyrdom, and one after another they responded—though not without qualms.
So, promptly at eight-thirty next morning, the campus in front of the Assembly building beheld a sight, the like of which had never thrilled the student body of S.P.U. since the first days of the Methodist Sunday-school. The discoverer and heir-apparent of the Ross Junior oil field turned into a newsboy! Standing on a bench, with an armful of papers, shouting gaily, “The Investigator! First issue of the Investigator! Five cents a copy!”
Did they buy them? Oh, ask! They crowded around Bunny three deep, he couldn’t make the change fast enough; as the excitement spread, they crowded six deep, ten deep—it was a mob, a riot! Everywhere, all over the campus, men and women, seeing the throng, came running. An accident? A fight? What was the matter? People who got their copies and drew out of the crowd, became centres of minor disturbances, others trying to see over their shoulders, asking questions.
For just about ten minutes this went on; until from the Administration building there emerged, portly and dignified, with gold nose-glasses and a roll of fat around his neck—just such a personage as you would meet in any big real estate office or bank in the city—Reginald T. Squirge, Ph. D., Dean of Men. Quietly and masterfully he penetrated the throng, and quietly and masterfully he took charge of the millionaire newsboy, and conducted him into his private office, still clutching his armful of papers. “Wait here,” he commanded, and again went out, and returned with Peter Nagle; a third time he went out, and his prey was Gregor Nikolaieff; while at his heels came deputy deans, appointed ad hoc, escorting the other criminals.
How many copies had been sold no one could say; the unsold copies were stacked in a corner of the Dean’s office, and if they were ever counted the result was not made known. But enough had been distributed to set the campus ablaze. “Have you read it?” “Have you got a copy?”—that was all anybody heard that day. The price of The Investigator leaped to one dollar, and before nightfall some had sold for two or three times that price.
One reason was that a copy had reached the Angel City Evening Booster, most popular of newspapers, printed in green, five editions per day. The second edition, on the streets about noon, carried a streamer head across the front page:
Red Nest at University!
Bolshevik Propaganda at S.P.U.
There followed a two-column story, carried over to page fourteen, giving a lurid account of The Investigator’s contents, including the most startling of the facts about the hiring of athletes for the university, and the whole text of the satiric poem about God—but alas, only a very brief hint as to what Harry Seager had told about Siberia. A little later in the day came the rivals of the Evening Booster, the Evening Roarer and the Evening Howler; they had been scooped one whole edition, but they made up for it by a mass of new details, some collected by telephone, the rest made up in the editorial offices. Said the Evening Roarer:
Red College Plot Unearthed
and it went on to tell how the police were seeking Russian agents who had made use of Southern Pacific students to get their propaganda into print. The Evening Howler, which went in especially for “human interest stuff,” featured the ringleader of the conspiracy:
Millionaire Red in College!
Son of Oil Magnate Backs Soviets!
And it scooped its rivals by having a photograph of Bunny, which it had got by rushing a man to the Ross home, and informing Aunt Emma that Bunny had just been awarded a prize for the best scholarship record in
