Bell saw that Whiteway had gotten his fondest wish: other newspapers could no longer ignore the Whiteway Cup. The aerial race was the biggest story in the country. But his rivals did not love him for it, and the questioning, two days before the race was to start, was openly hostile. Forty newspapermen were shouting questions, egged on by Van Dorn detective Scudder Smith, who had once been an actual newspaper reporter, or so he said.

“If that detective has imbibed as excessively as it appears,” Isaac Bell told Harry Warren, “suspend him for a week, and dock his pay for a month.”

“Scudder’s O.K.,” Harry assured him. “That’s just part of his disguise.”

“Disguised as what?”

“A drunken newspaper reporter.”

“He’s fooling me.”

“Can you deny, Mr. Whiteway,” a reporter from the Telegram howled aggrievedly, “that the extremely short hop from Belmont Park to Empire City Race Track in Yonkers is a ploy to charge more paying spectators from New York City?”

“Is it not true that you could fly from Belmont Park to Yonkers in a glider?” shouted the man from the Tribune.

“Ten miles, Mr. Whiteway?” asked the Times. “Could not the aviators simply walk?”

“Or ride bicycles?” chimed in Detective Smith.

Bell had to admire how cleverly Whiteway let his rivals’ reporters have their fun before he fired back with both barrels. In fact, he suspected Whiteway had probably planned the change all along to draw the other papers into his trap.

“It is my pleasure to fulfill your expectation of some new sensation by announcing a last-minute change in the course. The first leg to Empire City Race Track in Yonkers will entail the competitors flying a full eighteen miles west from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty. Upon arriving at America’s symbol of freedom, the aviators competing for the gold Whiteway Cup will circle the statue, for hundreds of thousands to see from riverbanks and spectator vessels, and then steer their machines another twenty-two miles north to Yonkers, for a grand total the first day of forty miles. These brave fliers will use the opportunity to ‘work the kinks out’ while crossing two bodies of water—the treacherous East River and the broad Upper Bay—then fly up the middle of the wide Hudson River to alight safely, God willing, in the infield of the Empire City Race Track, where an excellent aviation field is offered by the racing course . . . Thank you, gentlemen. I am sure that your editors anxiously await your stories to put extras on the street ahead of the competition.”

He might have added that the Whiteway papers’ “EXTRA”s were already in the hands of every newsboy in the city. But he didn’t have to. The reporters were stampeding to the racetrack telephones, cursing that they had been hoodwinked and that the editors would take it out of their hides.

“I HATE THAT DAMNED STATUE,” Harry Frost told Gene Weeks.