e. We are in the midst of chaos.

From Chicago the intelligence was similarly appalling. "A panic prevails
here," said the dispatch. "Impelled by a senseless apprehension of
disaster, people have lost their reason. The Mayor has just issued a
call upon the best citizens to assist him in preserving order."

It required no news expert to see that all the issues of life were
temporarily suspended by the tremendous and growing interest in this
stupendous mystery. Channels of news worn smooth by the placid streams
of everyday platitudes began to show the roll of this new freshet. A
dispatch from Washington was unintentionally significant. It read like
this: "The only explanation forwarded by Colonel Sandford of the
abandonment of the Pike's Peak signal station by himself and party is
that of a coward. He says the wind pressure indicated that the place
would speedily become untenable."

I turned over the sheet in which these disheartening facts were
presented and looked at the editorial page. There was a double-leaded
leader, evidently written late at night, and its conclusions were more
gruesome than the facts, for while the facts could be interpreted in
various ways according to the reader's condition of mind, there was no
mistaking the official tone of the editor whose business it was to weigh
and estimate the public value of news. It seemed to me that this umpire
to whom we instinctively looked for opinions had thrown up the sponge,
so to speak. Let me recall his words as they were impressed upon me that
morning:

That a grave crisis has arrived in the conditions of life on this
planet, it would be folly and is impossible any longer to deny. It
is not our province nor is it within our power to offer any
solution of the stupendous mystery that is now enveloping a part of
our continent. It is only imperative upon us, as brave agents in
the dispensing of truth, to say, with all the candor that we can
summon, that the effort of the Government to open communication
with the vast region west of what must now be known as the Meridian
of Silence has dismally failed, and it is the conviction of the
maturest judgment, based upon all the facts of the attempt that are
obtainable, that it failed because the explorers themselves ceased
to exist when they had passed a certain pretty well-defined line
which we now know extends north and south from Helena in Montana to