IX
In the ordinary course of events this newspaper excitement would have lasted thirty-two hours. Next afternoon’s papers would have recorded the fact that the university authorities had banned The Investigator, and on the following day their streamer-heads would have proclaimed, “Film Star Divorces Champ,” or “Magnate’s Wife Elopes with Cop.”
But fate had prepared a fantastic torment for the “parlor reds” of S.P.U. On the morning after their flyer in publicity, it chanced that a wagon loaded with blasting material, making its way through Wall Street with customary indifference to municipal ordinances, met with a collision and exploded. The accident happened in front of the banking offices of Morgan and Company, and about a dozen people were killed. A few minutes after the accident, the bankers called in America’s sleuth-celebrity to solve the mystery; and this able business man, facing the situation that if it was an accident it was nothing, while if it was a Bolshevik plot it was several hundred thousand dollars, took three minutes to look about him, and then pronounced it a plot.
And forthwith throughout the world a horde of spies and informers went to work, knowing that if he or she could find or invent a clue, it was fame and fortune for him or her. A wave of witch-hunting swept the country, and other countries—for two or three years thereafter new discoveries would be made, and new “revelations” promised, and poor devils in Polish and Romanian dungeons would have their arms twisted out of joint and their testicles macerated, while eager newspaper readers in New York and Chicago and Angel City waited ravenously for promised thrills.
As for the Angel City Evening Booster and Evening Howler and Evening Roarer, the situation confronting them was this: if they could connect the Bolshevik conspiracy in Southern Pacific University with the bomb explosion in Wall Street, they would have several hundred dollars’ additional sales; while if they failed to make the connection, they would lose this amount to some more clever rival. This being the case, it took the Evening Howler about one hour to remember that The Investigator had featured Harry Seager, and to ascertain from the agents of the American Defense League that at a recent mass-meeting this Seager had fiercely denounced the firm of Morgan and Company, and predicted a dire fate for them. So, in its third edition, on the streets about one o’clock, the Evening Howler told the world:
Bomb Foretold by Red Aid
Police Seek Soviet Agent Here
That was taking a chance, as the headline writer of the Evening Howler would have admitted with a grin; but he knew his business, and sure enough, before the day was by, a war veteran came into the editorial office with confirmation. Two days ago he had ridden on a public stage with Harry Seager, and had got into conversation, and heard the sentence: “You mark my words and watch the papers, within three days you will read that the House of Morgan has paid for its crimes in this war.” It is only fair to the shell-shocked soldier to add that he may have been sincere in his statement, for it happened that the two men in their conversation had touched upon the Polish invasion of Russia, then at its height, and Seager had uttered the sentence, “You mark my words and watch the papers, within three days you will read that the Poles are back of where they are now.”
Prior to this incident, the office door of the Seager Business College had been chewed to a ragged edge by the chisels of detectives and other patriots breaking their way in at night; but on the night after this “bomb expose” they used an axe, and when Seager arrived in the morning he found every desk-drawer in the place, not merely his own, but the students’, dumped onto the floor, and trampled beneath the hobnailed boots of patriotism. They had carted off, not merely Seager’s notes for his orations, but likewise the typewriting exercises of his students—and most damaging evidence they afforded, too, for Seager did not make his students write, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,”—no, siree, he gave them revolutionary propaganda that would send shivers down the spine of any patriot: “All men are created free and equal,” or, more desperate yet, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
X
Not many in Southern Pacific University seriously believed that their “student reds” had any responsibility for or even guilty knowledge of the Wall Street bomb explosion. But they knew that these silly fools had been misled by sinister men who quite possibly did have part in the plot, or anyhow were bad enough to have it. Also they knew that the fools had got the university in for a lot of hideous publicity. So the fools were badgered and browbeaten on every hand; they were summoned to the Dean’s office one by one and there racked and cross-questioned—and not merely by President Cowper and Dean Squirge, but by various stern gentlemen representing the district attorney and the city prosecutor and the federal secret service and the patriotic newspapers and the defense societies and the information service of the once-upon-a-time ambassador of a no-longer-existing Russian government.
When Bunny Ross realized that this was happening, there was another explosion. Being a rich man’s son, he was accustomed to having his rights, and more. So of the first of his questioners he demanded, “Who are you, and what brings you into this?”
“Now, Ross,” said Dean Squirge, “if there are evil men threatening our country’s welfare, you certainly do not wish to protect them.”
“It depends on what you mean by evil,” retorted Bunny. “If you mean men who
