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Peter, leaning toward him, spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

“I’ll make you a sporting proposition,” he murmured. “You owe me a hundred and fifty thousand francs. I’ll stake that against what only two men in the empire can give me.”

The prince allowed his eyes to travel slowly round the circle of the table. But the puzzled glances of the other players showed that to them Peter’s proposal conveyed no meaning.

The prince smiled cynically.

“For yourself?” he demanded.

“For Doctor Gilman,” said Peter.

“We will cut for deal and one hand will decide,” said the prince. His voice dropped to a whisper. “And no one must ever know,” he warned.

Peter also could be cynical.

“Not even the Sultan,” he said.

Abdul won the deal and gave himself a very good hand. But the hand he dealt Peter was the better one.

The prince was a good loser. The next afternoon the GAZETTE OFFICIALLY announced that upon Doctor Henry Gilman, professor emeritus of the University of Stillwater, U. S. A., the Sultan had been graciously pleased to confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crescent.

Peter flashed the great news to Stetson. The cable caught him at Quarantine. It read: “Captured Crescent, Grand Cross. Get busy.”

But before Stetson could get busy the campaign of publicity had been brilliantly opened from Constantinople. Prince Abdul, although pitchforked into the Gilman Defense Committee, proved himself one of its most enthusiastic members.

“For me it becomes a case of NOBLESSE OBLIGE,” he declared. “If it is worth doing at all it is worth doing well. To-day the Sultan will command that the ‘Rise and Fall’ be translated into Arabic, and that it be placed in the national library. Moreover, the University of Constantinople, the College of Salonica, and the National Historical Society have each elected Doctor Gilman an honorary member. I proposed him, the Patriarch of Mesopotamia seconded him. And the Turkish ambassador in America has been instructed to present the insignia with his own hands.”

Nor was Peter or Stimson idle. To assist Stetson in his press-work, and to further the idea that all Europe was now clamoring for the “Rise and fall,” Peter paid an impecunious but over-educated dragoman to translate it into five languages, and Stimson officially wrote of this, and of the bestowal of the Crescent to the State Department. He pointed out that not since General Grant had passed through Europe had the Sultan so highly honored an American. He added he had been requested by the grand vizier–who had been requested by Prince Abdul–to request the State Department to inform Doctor Gilman of these high honors. A request from such a source was a command and, as desired, the State Department wrote as requested by the grand vizier to Doctor Gilman, and tendered congratulations. The fact was sent out briefly from Washington by Associated Press. This official recognition by the Government and by the newspapers was all and more than Stetson wanted. He took off his coat and with a megaphone, rather than a pen, told the people of the United States who Doctor Gilman was, who the Sultan was, what a Grand Cross was, and why America’s greatest historian was not without honor save in his own country. Columns of this were paid for and appeared as “patent insides,” with a portrait of Doctor Gilman taken from the STILLWATER COLLEGE ANNUAL, and a picture of the Grand Cross drawn from imagination, in eight hundred newspapers of the Middle, Western, and Eastern States. special articles, paragraphs, portraits, and pictures of the Grand Cross followed, and, using Stillwater as his base, Stetson continued to flood the country. Young Hines, the local correspondent, acting under instructions by cable from Peter, introduced him to Doctor Gilman as a traveller who lectured on Turkey, and one who was a humble admirer of the author of the “Rise and fall.” Stetson, having studied it as a student crams an examination, begged that he might sit at the feet of the master. And for several evenings, actually at his feet, on the steps of the ivy-covered cottage, the disguised press-agent drew from the unworldly and unsuspecting scholar the simple story of his life. To this, still in his character as disciple and student, he added photographs he himself made of the master, of the master’s ivy-covered cottage, of his favorite walk across the campus, of the great historian at work at his desk, at work in his rose garden, at play with his wife on the croquet lawn. These he held until the insignia should be actually presented. This pleasing duty fell to the Turkish ambassador, who, much to his astonishment, had received instructions to proceed to Stillwater, Massachusetts, a place of which he had never heard, and present to a Doctor Gilman, of whom he had never heard, the Grand Cross of the Crescent. As soon as the insignia arrived in the official mail-bag a secretary brought it from Washington to Boston, and the ambassador travelled down from Bar Harbor to receive it, and with the secretary took the local train to Stillwater.