'By Jove!' Lord Dawlish stopped in his stride. He disentangled
himself from a pedestrian who had rammed him on the back. 'I'll do
it!'

He hailed a passing taxi and directed the driver to make for the
Pen and Ink Club.

The decision at which Bill had arrived with such dramatic
suddenness in the middle of Piccadilly was the same at which some
centuries earlier Columbus had arrived in the privacy of his home.

'Hang it!' said Bill to himself in the cab, 'I'll go to America!'
The exact words probably which Columbus had used, talking the
thing over with his wife.

Bill's knowledge of the great republic across the sea was at this
period of his life a little sketchy. He knew that there had been
unpleasantness between England and the United States in
seventeen-something and again in eighteen-something, but that
things had eventually been straightened out by Miss Edna May
and her fellow missionaries of the Belle of New York Company,
since which time there had been no more trouble. Of American
cocktails he had a fair working knowledge, and he appreciated
ragtime. But of the other great American institutions he was
completely ignorant.

He was on his way now to see Gates. Gates was a comparatively
recent addition to his list of friends, a New York newspaperman
who had come to England a few months before to act as his paper's