That was the last telegram.  At nightfall a fog shut down which was so dense that objects but three feet away could not be discerned.  This lasted all night.  The ferry-boats and even the omnibuses had to stop running.

III

Next morning the papers were as full of detective theories as before; they had all our tragic facts in detail also, and a great many more which they had received from their telegraphic correspondents.  Column after column was occupied, a third of its way down, with glaring head-lines, which it made my heart sick to read.  Their general tone was like this: 

     The white elephant at large!  He moves upon his fatal March whole
     villages deserted by their fright-stricken occupants!  Pale terror
     goes before him, death and devastation follow after!  After these,
     the detectives!  Barns destroyed, factories gutted, harvests
     devoured, public assemblages dispersed, accompanied by scenes of
     carnage impossible to describe!  Theories of thirty-four of the most
     distinguished detectives on the forces!  Theory of chief Blunt!

“There!” said Inspector Blunt, almost betrayed into excitement, “this is magnificent!  This is the greatest windfall that any detective organization ever had.  The fame of it will travel to the ends of the earth, and endure to the end of time, and my name with it.”

But there was no joy for me.  I felt as if I had committed all those red crimes, and that the elephant was only my irresponsible agent.  And how the list had grown!  In one place he had “interfered with an election and killed five repeaters.”  He had followed this act with the destruction of two pool fellows, named O’Donohue and McFlannigan, who had “found a refuge in the home of the oppressed of all lands only the day before, and were in the act of exercising for the first time the noble right of American citizens at the polls, when stricken down by the relentless hand of the Scourge of Siam.”  In another, he had “found a crazy sensation-preacher preparing his next season’s heroic attacks on the dance, the theater, and other things which can’t strike back, and had stepped on him.”  And in still another place he had “killed a lightning-rod agent.”  And so the list went on, growing redder and redder, and more and more heartbreaking.  Sixty persons had been killed, and two hundred and forty wounded.  All the accounts bore just testimony to the activity and devotion of the detectives, and all closed with the remark that “three hundred thousand citizen; and four detectives saw the dread creature, and two of the latter he destroyed.”