Эптон Синклер - Oil!

So, promptly at eight-thirty next morning, the campus in front of the Assembly building beheld a sight, the like of which had never thrilled the student-body of S. P. U. since the first days of the Methodist Sunday-school. The discoverer and heir-apparent of the Ross Junior oil field turned into a newsboy! Standing on a beach, with an armful of papers, shouting gaily, “The Investigator! First issue of the Investigator! Five cents a copy!”

Did they buy them? Oh, ask! They crowded around Bunny three deep, he couldn’t make the change fast enough; as the excitement spread, they crowded six deep, ten deep—it was a mob, a riot! Everywhere, all over the campus, men and women, seeing the throng, came running. An accident? A fight? What was the matter? People who got their copies and drew out of the crowd, became centres of minor disturbances, others trying to see over their shoulders, asking questions.

For just about ten minutes this went on; until from the Administration building there emerged, portly and dignified, with gold nose-glasses and a roll of fat around his neck—just such a personage as you would meet in any big real estate office or bank in the city—Reginal T. Squirge, Ph.D., Dean of Men. Quietly and masterfully he penetrated the throng, and quietly and masterfully he took charge of the millionaire newsboy, and conducted him into his private office, still clutching his armful of papers. “Wait here,” he commanded, and again went out, and returned with Peter Nagle; a third time he went out, and his prey was Gregor Nikolaieff; while at his heels came deputy deans, appointed ad hoc, escorting the other criminals.

How many copies had been sold no one could say; the unsold copies were stacked in a corner of the Dean’s office, and if they were ever counted the result was not made known. But enough had been distributed to set the campus ablaze. “Have you read it?” “Have you got a copy?”—that was all anybody heard that day. The price of “The Investigator” leaped to one dollar, and before night-fall some had sold for two or three times that price.

One reason was that a copy had reached the Angel City “Evening Booster,” most popular of newspapers, printed in green, five editions per day. The second edition, on the streets about noon, carried a “streamer head” across the front page:

RED NEST AT UNIVERSITY!

Bolshevik Propaganda at S. P. U.

There followed a two-column story, carried over to page fourteen, giving a lurid account of “The Investigator’s” contents, including the most startling of the facts about the hiring of athletes for the university, and the whole text of the satiric poem about God—but alas, only a very brief hint as to what Harry Seager had told about Siberia. A little later in the day came the rivals of the “Evening Booster,” the “Evening Roarer” and the “Evening Howler”; they had been scooped one whole edition, but they made up for it by a mass of new details, some collected by telephone, the rest made up in the editorial offices. Said the “Evening Roarer”:

RED COLLEGE PLOT UNEARTHED

and it went on to tell how the police were seeking Russian agents who had made use of Southern Pacific students to get their propaganda into print. The “Evening Howler,” which went in especially for “human interest stuff,” featured the ring-leader of the conspiracy:

MILLIONAIRE RED IN COLLEGE!

Son of Oil Magnate Backs Soviets!

And it scooped its rivals by having a photograph of Bunny, which it had got by rushing a man to the Ross home, and informing Aunt Emma that Bunny had just been awarded a prize for the best scholarship record in ten years. The good lady was so excited, she sent the butler out to the corner drug-store three times, to see if the “Evening Howler” had arrived with the story of that prize!

In the ordinary course of events this newspaper excitement would have lasted thirty-two hours. Next afternoon’s papers would have recorded the fact that the university authorities had banned “The Investigator,” and on the following day their streamer-heads would have proclaimed, “Film Star Divorces Champ,” or “Magnate’s Wife Elopes with Cop.”

But fate had prepared a fantastic torment for the “parlor reds” of S. P. U. On the morning after their flyer in publicity, it chanced that a wagon loaded with blasting material, making its way through Wall Street with customary indifference to municipal ordinances, met with a collision and exploded. The accident happened in front of the banking offices of Morgan and Company, and about a dozen people were killed. A few minutes after the accident, the bankers called in America’s sleuth-celebrity to solve the mystery; and this able business man, facing the situation that if it was an accident it was nothing, while if it was a Bolshevik plot it was several hundred thousand dollars, took three minutes to look about him, and then pronounced it a plot.

And forthwith throughout the world a horde of spies and informers went to work, knowing that if he or she could find or invent a clue, it was fame and fortune for him or her. A wave of witch-hunting swept the country, and other countries—for two or three years thereafter new discoveries would be made, and new “revelations” promised, and poor devils in Polish and Roumanian dungeons would have their arms twisted out of joint and their testicles macerated, while eager newspaper readers in New York and Chicago and Angel City waited ravenously for promised thrills.

As for the Angel City “Evening Booster” and “Evening Howler” and “Evening Roarer,” the situation confronting them was this: if they could connect the Bolshevik conspiracy in Southern Pacific University with the bomb explosion in Wall Street, they would have several hundred dollars’ additional sales; while if they failed to make the connection, they would lose this amount to some more clever rival. This being the case, it took the “Evening Howler” about one hour to remember that “The Investigator” had featured Harry Seager, and to ascertain from the agents of the American Defense League that at a recent mass-meeting this Seager had fiercely denounced the firm of Morgan and Company, and predicted a dire fate for them. So, in its third edition, on the streets about one o’clock, the “Evening Howler” told the world:

BOMB FORETOLD BY RED AID

Police Seek Soviet Agent Here

That was taking a chance, as the headline writer of the “Evening Howler” would have admitted with a grin; but he knew his business, and sure enough, before the day was by, a war veteran came into the editorial office with confirmation. Two days ago he had ridden on a public stage with Harry Seager, and had got into conversation, and heard the sentence: “You make my words and watch the papers, within three days you will read that the House of Morgan has paid for its crimes in this war.” It is only fair to the shell-shocked soldier to add that he may have been sincere in his statement, for it happened that the two men in their conversation had touched upon the Polish invasion of Russia, then at its height, and Seager had uttered the sentence, “You mark my words and watch the papers, within three days you will read that the Poles are back of where they are now.”

Prior to this incident, the office door of the Seager Business College had been chewed to a ragged edge by the chisels of detectives and other patriots breaking their way in at night; but on the night after this “bomb expose” they used an axe, and when Seager arrived in the morning he found every desk-drawer in the place, not merely his own, but the students’, dumped onto the floor, and trampled beneath the hob-nailed boots of patriotism. They had carted off, not merely Seager’s notes for his orations, but likewise the typewriting exercises of his students—and most damaging evidence they afforded, too, for Seager did not make his students write, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,”—no, siree, he gave them revolutionary propaganda that would send shivers down the spine of any patriot: “All men are created free and equal,” or, more desperate yet, “Give me liberty or give me death!”