“Here’s a queer item,” remarked the man at the window end of the long leather-covered seat, looking up from his newspaper and apparently speaking in general to the other occupants of the Pullman smoking compartment. “There’s a dispatch here announcing the death from tuberculosis of that Serbian who shot the Archduke of Austria at Sarajevo. It seems he has been in prison ever since. I thought he had been executed long ago.” Four of us, strangers to one another, had settled in the smoking compartment at the beginning of the journey from Chicago to New York, and as we had been on our way nearly an hour it seemed time for conversation. “They didn’t execute him,” replied a man who sat in one of the chairs, “because he was under age. It’s against the law, over there, to execute a person under twenty-one. This boy was only nineteen.” “The law wouldn’t have cut much figure over here in a case like that,” replied the first speaker. “Perhaps not,” returned the man in the chair, “but respect for law is one of the few benefits that seem to go with autocratic government. I don’t find that dispatch in my paper. May I borrow yours?” The other handed over the journal, indicating the item with his finger. “I had almost forgotten that fellow,” spoke up a third traveler. “The rush and magnitude of the war have carried our thoughts—and for the matter of that, our soldiers too—a pretty long way since the assassination occurred. Yet I suppose historians, digging back into the minute beginnings of the war, will all trace down to the shot fired by that Serbian.” “That’s what the paper says,” returned the one who had begun to talk. “It speaks of ‘the historic shot fired in Serbia’ as the thing that fired the world.” “And in doing so,” declared the man who had borrowed the paper, “it falls into a popular error. The shot was _not_ fired in Serbia, but in Austria-Hungary, and the boy who did the shooting was an Austro-Hungarian subject.” “But that doesn’t seem possible,” interposed the man who had spoken of the historical aspect of the case. “If he was an Austrian subject and did the shooting in Austria, how could Austria make that an excuse for attacking Serbia?” The other looked from the window for a moment before replying. “It was one of the poorest excuses imaginable,” he returned. “Autocracies can do those things; that’s why they must be stamped out. As you said, historians will trace back to the assassination. It so happened that I was over there at the time and got a glimpse of what lay back of the assassination—microscopic, unclean forces of which historians will never hear, yet which seem peculiarly suitable in connection with Austria’s crime. But I had better not get to talking about all that.”