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CAST OF CHARACTERS
Count Cyril Mikailberg Paul Panzer
Anna Octavia Handicorth
Captain Porter Crane Wilbur
For six months diplomatic correspondence between the two nations on the passport question threatened to exhaust the penmanship of the legation secretary and the suavity of the Russian ambassador. The press of the country had treated the matter emotionally at first, with Sunday Magazine articles of the suppositional attack and destruction of New York by the Czar's navy; several Congressmen had delivered neurotic speeches on the floor of the House, to the edification of their home towns, at least, and the Boy Scouts wigwagged a warning from the coast of Maine all the way to the Secretary of War in Washington.
The warlike movements of this latter gentleman were as evident as the moves of sidewalk checker players on a sunny day in South Street. To abet his publicity, the evening editions told, to a gun, the number and location of coast artillery pieces being mounted, their caliber and range, and what the artillerists thought they
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could hit under varying conditions. Where regular ordnance officers refused to be interviewed, the photographs and stories of militia ones, and inventors of high explosives, were hurried into print. All this for the technical enlightenment of several whiskered noblemen, who sat gravely around a council table in Europe, where press censorship is still a relic of the dark and tongueless ages.
Some three weeks before the opening of this story, Count Cyril Mikailberg had assured our government that our demands would slowly but surely be met by Russia. " There is a certain national dignity, ' ' he had asseverated, ''which must be persuaded that nothing of national honor is touched. Ah ! " he deplored, ' ' if your political firebrands could but be held in leash, and the entente cordiale preserved, I am convinced that the Duma will persuade the Czar to swallow the pill which you are offering him. ' '
So much from the mouthpiece of the Czar, but on the selfsame day an urg