Mr. Gage shook his head. “This terrible affair,” he said weightily, “amply confirms the opinion I have ventured already to express to you that the police are up against the most powerful and certainly the most sinister force in the world to-day.” The Chief was frankly annoyed. “Nonsense! I refuse to believe anything of the kind. And in any event, no matter what its power, we are going to fight it. Tell Norton to come to me in half an hour.” The keenly intelligent face of Bennet Gage clouded heavily. With the look of a man who staggers under a blow, he went to the door. But as he got there, he changed his mind. Turning suddenly, he came back several paces into the room. “It’s no use, sir.” The voice was full of pain. “I know it’s a subject on which you won’t listen to advice. But it’s one also in which I feel I must obey my deepest instinct. Frankly, I haven’t your courage. So that if you have fully made up your mind to disregard these warnings, I must ask you to announce in to-morrow’s _Planet_ that I am no longer its editor.” XIV Bennet Gage had delivered an ultimatum. The Colossus was far from expecting it. He had come to look upon the staunch, the tried, the absolutely dependable Gage as a segment of his other self. Saul Hartz would have been the first to own, for he was fundamentally generous, that much of the _Planet’s_ success was due to the ability of its editor-in-chief; and for himself there was no man on whose services he set a higher value. At the same time he must follow his star. No member of his staff was ever allowed to oppose his will. Advice was sometimes sought, it was sometimes taken, but even a man of Gage’s quality could not be permitted to offer it, much less to insist upon it, uninvited. “You are talking like a fool, Gage, aren’t you?” The Colossus was too primitive to weigh his words overmuch at any time; in a crisis his bluntness of phrase seemed to add to his power. “Why go off at half cock, my friend?” The editor of the _Planet_ folded his arms, a little after the fashion of Napoleon, although he had too balanced a mind ever to feel in the least Napoleonic. “I don’t know why,” he said after a moment’s pause. “It may not be very logical and I daresay I shall live to regret it, but there is something there that tells me”--he pointed a finger ruefully whimsical at the pit of his own stomach--“that at all hazards we have to keep out of this.” “Not ‘we,’ my friend.” The voice of Saul Hartz took him up sharply. “Confine yourself to the first person singular.” “When I say ‘we’, I mean the _Planet_ newspaper, a thing over and beyond myself.” “Be it so. And for that reason you must stand to your guns. We can carry on, of course, without you. No man is indispensable. But you are by far the ablest person in this office with one exception ... put that in your pipe and smoke it! ... and you mustn’t think of leaving the ship at such a crisis.”