“Wait!” I called. “Say, hold on! Cut this! I won’t do it! I don’t agree to this!” but it was too late. In a trice the prisoner and the rest of them were up the two or three low steps of the main entrance and into the hall, and I was left outside to meditate on the insanity of the thing I had done.
“Great God!” I suddenly exclaimed to myself. “What have I let that fellow do to me? I’ve been hypnotized, that’s what it is! I’ve allowed him to take a prisoner whom I had in my own hands at one time into the office of our great rival to be photographed! He’s put it all over me on this job—and I had him beaten! I had him where I could have shoved him off the train—and now I let him do this to me, and tomorrow there’ll be a long editorial in the _Globe_ telling how this fellow was brought there first and photographed, and his picture to prove it!” I swore and groaned for blocks as I walked towards the _Republic_, wondering what I should do.
Distinct as was my failure, it was so easy, even when practically admitting the whole truth, to make it seem as though the police had deliberately worked against the _Republic_. I did not even have to do that but merely recited my protests, without admitting or insisting upon hypnotism, which Wandell would not have believed anyhow. On the instant he burst into a great rage against the police department, seeing apparently no fault in anything I had done, and vowing vengeance. They were always doing this; they did it to the _Republic_ when he was on the _Globe_. Wait—he would get even with them yet! Rushing a photographer to the jail, he had various pictures made, all of which appeared with my story, but to no purpose. The _Globe_ had us beaten. Although I had slaved over the text, given it the finest turns I could, still there on the front page of the _Globe_ was a large picture of the bandit, seated in the sanctum sanctorum of the great G-D, a portion of the figure, although not the head, of its great chief standing in the background, and over it all, in extra large type, the caption:
“LONE TRAIN ROBBER VISITS OFFICE OF GLOBE TO PAY HIS RESPECTS”
and underneath in italics a full account of how he had willingly and gladly come there.
I suffered tortures, not only for days but for weeks and months, absolute tortures. Whenever I thought of Galvin I wanted to kill him. To think, I said to myself, that I had thought of the two trains and then run across the meadow and paid the agent for stopping the train, which permitted Galvin to see the burglar at all, and then to be done in this way! And, what was worse, he was so gayly and cynically conscious of having done me. When we met on the street one day, his lip curled with the old undying hatred and contempt.