I slept till ten, but once up, I read my story with huge approval in my early paper, and saw everybody else reading it, as I went down town. My ears were filled with excited comment, and I examined with much glee the pained comments or total silence of our contemporaries. Especially did they condemn my prophecy. Reaching the office, I stopped on the first floor to get a late edition, among a general stare which I endeavored to bear modestly. At the elevator door, I paused. “Should I walk or ride? Walk it is,” I decided. I wanted to stop in the hall outside the big office to look over my story again. As I sat in the hall window, I looked down. I could see a multitude before our bulletin board. None of the other papers had any crowd at all. As I looked, the throng went wild. A great roar rose, and the mass seethed and swayed as they gazed at the bulletin below me, but out of my sight. “Something’s up,” I said to myself, and bolted for the office. The reporters and editors were all clustered in one corner. As they saw me, a shout went up. “Orrington, the British battleship Dreadnought, Number 8, has disappeared!” CHAPTER IV The disappearance of His Britannic Majesty’s battleship Dreadnought Number 8 sent the world wild. Two great nations had suffered severe blows, and lay in quivering expectation of the future. The chief of my paper smiled at me more amicably than ever before, as I entered the office the third day after the British battleship disappeared utterly in the channel. “You’d better run that prophecy of yours about the French battleship to-day,” he said, “and then keep out of the office. I don’t want you to be in evidence. We’ve got too good a thing to take any chances. Work as hard as you want to on the assignment, but don’t appear publicly.” I nodded acquiescence. “By the way,” he went on, “just how many people outside our own staff know of the second letter?” “Seven,” I answered. “The President, the Secretary of War, the two Haldanes and their cousin Mrs. Hartnell, Richard Regnier and John King. The former Secretary of the Navy did know, but he’s dead. They are all pledged to secrecy, and all have kept the story wholly to themselves.” “That’s all,” said the chief, and I left. That night I sent in a prediction that a French battleship would sink within a week, and then spent the next few days going over the naval registers of the nations, and in correlating the mass of data concerning the navies of the world, which had been collected at the office by my request. I wanted to get all the information concerning the subject in hand that I could possibly obtain. Immersed in masses of data, struggling with theory after theory that arose only to be rejected, I passed the week. Weary from my labors, one afternoon I left my work to go to the Haldanes to report progress. Tom and Dorothy were both immersed in a research Tom was carrying on, but they always had time to discuss the great question.