Books › Blue Book v25 n01 [1917-05], 1917 › scan 6
Scan 6
Blue Book v25 n01 [1917-05], 1917
19 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Explaining the Villain
2By Will Payne
4The three men reached the White House at almost the same time and were shown in to the President at five minutes past five.
6Entering, they felt at once the atmosphere of a crisis. The President greeted them in a subdued and toneless voice, without the glimmer of a smile. When they were seated, he spoke again:
8"I have a very serious matter to lay before you, gentlemen. We have just received Whipple's report on the Bronx affair. I will read it to you."
10There were only four persons in the room, all of them middle-aged, in sack coats and unstarched shirts—Sansom's hair, as usual, in need of combing. A group just like them in general aspect might have been discovered at the same moment in a thousand offices, hotel-lobbies and smoking-rooms between the two oceans, the Canadian line and the Rio Grande. But as the man at the head of the table read on, a portentous presence invisibly filled the room.
12It was a quarter after six when they arose—all with a heaviness of mind, absorbed, unsmiling. At the door the President spoke low:
14"Members of the Cabinet will be here at eight o'clock; but no meeting is to be announced." He paused an instant, his grave eyes passing over one face after another. "Announcements are particularly what we do not want just now. A million lives may be involved in this. Be careful, gentlemen."
16They murmured acquiescence and went out, each so preoccupied that, being out of doors, they separated without even a nod.
18The youngest and tallest of them—James Sansom, acting as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during the illness of Senator Barnes—struck across Pennsylvania Avenue and through Lafayette Square. At forty-six he was serving his third term in the Senate, and he had been elected to the House in his twenty-sixth year. His walk was a flow of high-geared nervous energy driving a tall, gangling frame—head bent, gray eyes only mechanically noting the turning of the path, an absent-minded line down the middle of his forehead under the brim of a well-worn slouch hat. His thick, unruly hair was darkish red; his face, with square brow, solid chin and generous nose, was smooth-shaven and high-colored. It was a homely high
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