III
President Harding died; and Dan Irving wrote Bunny the gossip from Washington. The old gentleman had been reluctant to take the oil men’s money, so Barney Brockway and his “fixer” had fixed things for him—they had “carried an account” in a Wall Street brokerage, a method whereby business men make life comfortable for statesmen. Every now and then they would bring the old gentleman a bundle of liberty bonds which they had “won” for him. And now his widow had found several hundred thousand dollars of these bonds in a safe deposit box, and become convinced that he had meant them for another woman, and was in such a fury about it that she was telling all her friends, and giving great glee to Washington gossip.
And then the new president: a little man whose fame was based upon the legend that he had put down a strike of the Boston policemen, when the truth was that he had been hiding in his hotel room, with a black eye presented to him by the mayor of the city. His dream in life, as reported by himself, was to keep a store, and that was the measure of his mentality. He didn’t know what to say, and so the newspapers called him a “strong silent man.”
Bunny didn’t publish much of this, because Rachel didn’t approve of gossip. But they did publish some of the inside facts about professionalism in college athletics, and when this was offered for sale on the campuses, the athletic students mobbed the “Ypsels.” But even the mobbers read the paper, and Bunny was having the time of his life.
In December the new Congress assembled, and an alarming state of affairs was revealed; the “insurgents” had the balance of power in the Senate, and their first move was to combine with the Democrats and order an investigation of the oil leases. This news fell upon Dad and Verne like a thunderbolt—their scouts in Washington had failed to foresee such a calamity, and Verne had to jump into his private car and hurry to Washington, to see what a last-minute expenditure of cash might do. Apparently it didn’t do much, for the committee proceeded to put witnesses on the stand and “grill” them—a terrifying newspaper phrase, but really it was not so much a culinary operation as an explosion, with the debris scattered all over the front pages of the press.
The thing was too sensational to be held down any longer. It didn’t read like politics, but like some blood and thunder movie. Secretary Crisby hadn’t had the sense to put his oil money into liberty bonds and hide them in a safe deposit box—he had gone like a fool and paid off a big mortgage on his Texas ranch, and bought a lot of stuff that everybody could see; he had even told the foreman of his ranch that he had got sixty-eight thousand dollars from Vernon Roscoe, and the foreman had told one of the ranch-hands. Now the senators put the badly rattled foreman on the witness stand, and he had to explain that it was all a misunderstanding—what he had said was not “sixty-eight thousand dollars,” but “six or eight cows.” You can see how easy it was for such a mistake to happen!
But then it was shown that Secretary Crisby had deposited a hundred thousand dollars in his bank one day; and where had he got that? A great Washington newspaper publisher came forward to declare that he had loaned his dear friend the secretary that little sum for no particular reason. The great publisher then went off to Florida to spend the winter, and he was sick and couldn’t possibly be disturbed. But the perverse committee sent one of its members to Florida and put the publisher on the witness stand, and in the presence of half a hundred newspaper reporters pinned him down and made him admit that his story had been a friendly fairytale.
Where had the hundred thousand come from? The scandalmongers were busy, of course—fellows like Dan Irving running to the committee with tales of what Washington gossip was saying. So the committee grabbed “Young Pete” O’Reilly, and grilled him, and made him admit that he had carried the trifling sum of a hundred thousand dollars to Secretary Crisby in a little black bag—more stuff right out of a movie! And then they grabbed “Old Pete,” and he claimed it was just a loan—he had got a note, but he couldn’t recollect where the note was. He finally produced a signature which he said had been cut off the note, but he couldn’t tell what had become of the rest of it; he was very careless about notes, and thought he had given this one to his wife, who had misplaced all but the signature. And these scandalous details about the leaders of the most fashionable society in Washington and Angel City! The newspapers published it, even while they shivered at their own irreverence.
IV
Every day Dad was getting long telegrams from Verne, not coming direct, of course, but addressed to Mrs. Bolling, the wife of the trusty young executive; they were signed “A. H. Dory”—a play upon Dad’s favorite formula, “All hunkydory.” They were not the sort of telegrams that a doctor would have picked out for the soothing of his patient’s nerves; no, they kept the patient in a fever of anxiety—how many, many times he wished that he had listened to the warnings of his young idealist, and kept clear of this mess of corruption! But of course Bunny couldn’t say that now; he could only read the news and wait and wonder at what hour the thunderbolt would descend upon them.
Annabelle’s new picture was done, A Mother’s Heart, and there was going to be an especially grand premiere,
