We walked the long distance back to town and dropped in at ----. Lanagan had not addressed a word to me. I knew better than to attempt to draw him into conversation. I could feel that he was working the thing over and over again in his mind. He suddenly burst forth passionately: “I could have beaten them! I could have beaten them! And they didn’t convince me at that, that the story should not have been printed! There’s too much of this one-man-for-the-nation stuff in our government, anyhow.” It was months before Lanagan told me that it was because of my wife’s feeble health that he feared to take the risk of having us both bottled up for a month, by manoeuvring further for freedom; and had added: “Merely another argument to prove that your true reporter should not marry.” And as if to justify the truth of Lanagan’s assertion to me that the story should have been printed, within three days the Japanese fleet, scorpion-like, had struck and crippled that unsuspecting and unready Russian flotilla. “Yah!” Lanagan had cried to me in furious disgust, as he ripped the front page of the _Enquirer_ with its seven-column war head to tatters, “Statesmen! Diplomats! Give me one live reporter, and I’ll teach the whole gang of them the right way! Do you suppose for one single, solitary, coruscating second, that if those Japs knew the Secretary was hobnobbing with the Russian envoy right here in San Francisco, that the blow would have been struck? Well, I tell you No! I wouldn’t even have had to print the message. The story of the meeting was enough.” Well, the time limit set by the Secretary has long since expired, so here is the suppressed story of the Ambassador’s Stick-Pin, the finest, biggest, cleanest in its elements of any of his whole career, as Lanagan mourned to me more than once. VI WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH VI WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH Sampson, city editor of the San Francisco _Enquirer_, sat scowling over the _Times_ and the _Herald_. Stripped blackly across the front pages of those rival morning papers was the unaccustomed seven-column head: SUSPECT JAILED FOR MONTEAGLE MURDER! “_Norton!_” It was Sampson’s voice. When Sampson shot that curt call in his ugly voice through the swinging doors of his office I felt as though the warden was calling me from the condemned cell for the drop. Only the able-bodied newspaper man who has been trimmed hard by the men of the opposition papers can understand the sensation. It belongs in its exquisite misery solely to such as speak the language of the tribe. For the head in the _Enquirer_--my story--had been only a three-column: POLICE ARE BAFFLED IN MONTEAGLE MYSTERY! Sampson contemplated me coldly and long; he fairly brooded over me. But there was no outburst, and that, after all, hurt worse than if he had put me on the irons for a broiling.