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April 4, 1941

Dear Dr. Schmitt:

Thank you for your card from Brownsville. We were glad to hear Tuesday that you had arrived safely and found everything all right down there. An Eastern airliner, flying between Miami and New York, went down in a Florida swamp.  It was lost for several hours before it could be found. Had sixteen people aboard, but no one was killed, though everyone was injured but only slightly. They were very lucky.

I am sending you copies of some correspondence with Iselin. The telegram came two days ago, of course, but I waited for the letter which arrived only this morning. I send also a carbon of my reply. I called up Graf and told him the gist of Iselin's letter and said I would send it over to him. He sounded rather uninterested. I hope the thing is not going to be messed up for you while you are not here to defend your own interests. I hope what I wrote Iselin is all right. I thought it only right to tell him that you were actually down there looking the ground over. That knowledge might make him more willing to wait for an answer about the [[underlined]] Dohrn [[/underlined]].

I haven't told any one else that you have gone anywhere but Panama. I think Schultz is burning up with curiosity, unless he has found out elsewhere. Hilda was in here and asked if you weren't here and I said, "Oh, he flew to Panama Saturday." She was open-mouthed in astonishment, and I know she ran back as fast as she could to tell Schultz. Later in the day I met him at the rotunda door. He half-stopped and said, "I hear your boss has gone off on another trip." I didn't slacken my pace as I passed him; just said breezily back over my shoulder, "Yes, he's off again, off again, gone again." I just thought--let him [[strikethrough]] trip [[/strikethrough]] try and find out anything from me!

I took the Jackson manuscript back to Mr. True's office yesteryday afternoon. I had worked on it steadily all week, and I still would hate to bet very much money on its accuracy! I made a decision one way or the other, to my [[underlined]] own satisfaction [[/underlined]], on all the points Mumford brought up, caught a couple of typographical errors, and checked a few references again. Unless we get out the books and check every reference in the paper, that is about all we can do. Miss MacManus has been working on it, too, for quite some time.
 
Mr. Bryant is arranging to get your passport. They will not give back the old one, I understand, but will issue a new one for which they demanded new photographs. I dug up my copy of the picture Mr. Wisherd (Nat. Geographic) took of you and Mr. Bryant had several prints of passport size made. It takes a letter from Secretary Abbot to get the passport, but he wrote it yesterday and two copies of the new pictures were sent up with his letter. Mr. Bryant will send the passport off as soon as he gets it. I'm sure you'll get it in time.

A letter came yesterday from Gates, in which he asked you to arrange for rooms for them next week with the woman with whom[[strikethrough]]e[[/strikethrough]] they stayed last time they were here. I called Mrs. Schmitt to get the woman's name,