the people hurrying through the streets
at that late hour.

John Halifax read the whole story through once more with considerable
satisfaction, and was pleased to think that the _New York Daily
Telegraph_ would treat its readers Monday morning to a thoroughly
sensational bit of news. When he had finished, it struck him that all
these attacks had been directed against trains running from west to
east, and that the train held up at Swallowtown was the only one going
in the opposite direction. He intended in conclusion to add a suggestive
remark about this fact, but it slipped out of his mind somehow, and,
yawning loudly, he threw his article as it was into the box near his
writing table, touched a button, and saw the result of his labors
swallowed noiselessly by a small lift. Then the author yawned again,
and, going over to his chief, reported that he had finished, wished him
a gruff "good morning," and started on his way home.

As he left the newspaper offices he observed the same sight that had met
his eyes night after night for many years--a crowd of people standing on
the opposite side of the street, with their heads thrown back, staring
up at the white board upon which, in enormous letters, appeared the
story of how Tom, with his bold leap, had saved the train. The last
sentence, explaining that the robbers had been recognized as Japanese,
elicited vigorous curses against the "damned Japs."

High up in the air the apparatus noiselessly and untiringly flashed
forth one message after the other in big, black letters on the white
ground--telling of one train attack after another. But of that living
machine in the far West, working with clocklike regularity and slowly
adding one link after the other to the chain, that machine which at this
very moment had already separated three of the States by an impenetrable
wall from the others and had thus blotted out three of the stars on the
blue field of the Union flag--of that uncanny machine neither John
Halifax nor the people loitering opposite the newspaper building in
order to take a last sensation home with them, had the remotest idea.
Not till the next morning was the meaning of these first flaming signs
to be made clear.

* * * * *

At ten o'clock the telephone bell rang noisily beside John Halifax's
bed. He seized the receiver and swore under his breath on learning that
important telegrams required his presence at the office. "There is