Oil! by Upton Sinclair

In the ordinary course of events this newspaper excitement would have lasted thirty-two hours. Next afternoon's papers would have recorded the fact that the university authorities had banned The Investigator, and on the following day their streamer-heads would have proclaimed, "Film Star Divorces Champ," or "Magnate's Wife Elopes with Cop."

But fate had prepared a fantastic torment for the "parlor reds" of S. P. U. On the morning after their flyer in publicity, it chanced that a wagon loaded with blasting material, making its way through Wall Street with customary indifference to municipal ordinances, met with a collision and exploded. The accident happened in front of the banking offices of Morgan and Company, and about a dozen people were killed. A few minutes after the accident, the bankers called in America's sleuth-celebrity to solve the mystery; and this able business man, facing the situation that if it was an accident it was nothing, while if it was a Bolshevik plot it was several hundred thousand dollars, took three minutes to look about him, and then pronounced it a plot.