In the course of the next hour or two there were a dozen newspaper reporters besieging the mansion, and camera men taking pictures of it, and even spying with opera glasses from a distance.  Before my mind’s eye flashed new headlines: 

MOVIE MAGNATE HIDES MOB PROPHET FROM LAW

This was an aspect of the matter which we had at first overlooked.  Carpenter was due at Judge Ponty’s police-court at nine o’clock that morning.  Was he going? demanded the reporters, and if not, why not?  Mary Magna no doubt would be willing to sacrifice the two hundred dollars bail that she had put up; but the judge had a right to issue a bench warrant and send a deputy for the prisoner.  Would he do it?

Behind the scenes of Western City’s government there began forthwith a tremendous diplomatic duel.  Who it was that wanted Carpenter dragged out of his hiding-place, we could not be sure, but we knew who it was that wanted him to stay hidden!  I called up my uncle Timothy, and explained the situation.  It wasn’t worth while for him to waste his breath scolding, I was going to stand by my prophet.  If he wanted to put an end to the scandal, let him do what he could to see that the prophet was let alone.

“But, Billy, what can I do?” he cried.  “It’s a matter of the law.”

I answered:  “Fudge!  You know perfectly well there’s no magistrate or judge in this city that won’t do what he’s told, if the right people tell him.  What I want you to do is to get busy with de Wiggs and Westerly and Carson, and the rest of the big gang, and persuade them that there’s nothing to be gained by dragging Carpenter out of his hiding-place.”

What did they want anyway?  I argued.  They wanted the agitation stopped.  Well, we had stopped it, and without any bloodshed.  If they dragged the prophet out from concealment, and into a police court, they would only have more excitement, more tumult, ending nobody could tell how.

I called up several other people who might have influence; and meanwhile T-S was over at his office in Eternal City, pleading over the telephone with the editors of afternoon papers.  They had got the Red Prophet out of the way during the convention, and why couldn’t they let well enough alone?  Wasn’t there news enough, with five or ten thousand war-heroes coming to town, without bothering about one poor religious freak?

When you shoot a load of shot at a duck, and the bird comes tumbling down, you do not bother to ask which particular shot it was that hit the target.  And so it was with these frantic efforts of ours.  One shot must have hit, for at eleven o’clock that morning, when the case of John Doe Carpenter versus the Commonwealth of Western City was reached in Judge Ponty’s court, and the bailiff called the name of the defendant and there was no answer, the magistrate in a single sentence declared the bail forfeited, and passed on to the next case without a word.  And all three of our afternoon newspapers reported this incident in an obscure corner on an inside page.  The Red Prophet was dead and buried!