Read Online Rex Stout by The President Vanishes - Free Book Online Page A

Vice-President had finished Corcoran was on his feet. The Vice-President said, “Senator Corcoran.”
    “I move we adjourn.”
    Half the members were up from their seats; a dozen were shouting for recognition, the loudest Senator Allen; one of them was a second for Corcoran. The Vice-President brought the gavel down, shouted a brief sentence into the upturned faces of the joint session of Congress, and left the rostrum, taking the Speaker with him.
    All that was left was bedlam: indignation, alarm, bewilderment, chaos.
    The man seated next to Bronson Tilney, Collins of Vermont, yelled in his ear, “It’s a dirty clever trick, but he’ll pay for it.” Tilney, his eyes more exhausted than ever, paid no attention to him.
    A quarter of an hour later Mrs. Richard Arthur Coulter, homeward bound in her limousine with her friend Diana Freeman, evolved an idea that might have prevented the contretemps, “You know, my dear, I think a President should have an understudy, like an opera singer. Don’t you?”

3
    Of the reports which circulated through Washington that Tuesday afternoon, it was more than ordinarily difficult to sift the facts from the rumors. For three hours perhaps a hundred thousand citizens thought the President had been assassinated; where that one started was not known, but it traveled all over the city, and beyond. That was what the afternoon was like. President Stanley wanted more time to make up his mind; or he had a nervous breakdown; or he was drunk; or he had been assassinated by a Red or a Gray Shirt or a Jap; or he had put over a fast one on Congress. The odd thing was that these uncertainties were passed around and discussed not only by the common folk who are often permitted to learn only what is supposed to be good for them anyway, but evenby persons who were accustomed to expect more prompt and definite information. The Senate and House leaders, the first rank ambassadors, the chiefs of the press bureaus, for all their frantic efforts, were left with nothing better than their choice among the morsels of wild conjecture which were clogging the telephones and telegraph wires of the country.
    At half-past three it became known definitely that the Cabinet members had been summoned to the White House. At four, the Secretary of State appeared in the room in the Executive Offices maintained for the representatives of the press, announced brusquely that no information would be given until the Cabinet meeting had ended and he could not tell when that would be, and departed. The press howled at his back.
    It was more of a let-down, perhaps, for the groups gathered in the Capitol grounds for the purpose of demonstrating this and that, than it had been for the lawmakers in the chamber. Characteristically not only of them but of the two-footed race they belonged to, they at first regarded it as a low trick designed primarily for their frustration. They howled, and began to look around for a head to crack or somebody to trip up. But the police got earnest, and it soon became evident that the anticlimax and the uncertainty had caused the temper of the demonstrators to deteriorate from sacrificial ardor to plain ill-nature. That was easier to deal with, and they were scattered ignominiously; the grounds were cleared and the streets patrolled with no worse results than a few busted jaws and a broken bone or two.
    It was exactly three o’clock when the truth of the matter became known to anyone beyond Mrs. Stanley, Harry Brownell, the President’s secretary, and two Secret Service men. At that hour the members of the Cabinet, summoned by Brownell by telephone, had assembled in the room ordinarily used for their meetings during the Stanley administration—the library on the second floor. They were all there, including the Vice-President; Billings, Secretary of Agriculture, called from a conference with the Federal Trade Commission, had been the last to arrive. Some seated, some standing, they were waiting. For the