“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: