Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

Dog-tired and happier than any poor dog of a newspaper man has a right to be, Singlebury went to his room and to bed. And when finally he fell asleep he dreamed the second chapter of that orange-blossomy dream of his.

Being left to himself, Mr. Foxman read Singlebury’s copy through page by page, changing words here and there, but on the whole enormously pleased with it. Then he touched a buzzer button under his desk, being minded to call into conference the chief editorial writer and the news editor before he put the narrative into type. Now it happened that at this precise moment Mr. Foxman’s own special boy had left his post just outside Mr. Foxman’s door to skylark with a couple of ordinary copy boys in the corridor between the city room and the Sunday room, and so he didn’t answer the summons immediately. The fact was, he didn’t hear the bell until Mr. Foxman impatiently rang a second and a third time. Then he came running, making up a suitable excuse to explain his tardiness as he came. And during that half minute of delay there leaped out of nowhere into Mr. Foxman’s brain an idea – an idea, horned, hoofed and hairy – which was to alter the current of his own life and, directly or indirectly, the lives of scores of others.

It would seem I was a trifle premature, back yonder near the beginning of this chapter, when I used the line: Six-thirty-four – enter the villain.

Because, as I now realise, the villain didn’t enter then. The villain did not enter until this moment, more than forty-eight hours later, entering not in the guise of a human being but in the shape of this tufted, woolly demon of a notion which took such sudden lodgment in Mr. Foxman’s mind. Really, I suppose we should blame the office boy. His being late may have been responsible for the whole thing.

He poked a tow head in at the door, ready to take a scolding.

“D’yer ring, sir?” he inquired meekly.

“Yes, three times,” said Mr. Foxman. “Where have you been?”

“Right here, sir. Somethin’ you wanted, sir?”

“No; I’ve changed my mind. Get out!”

Pleased and surprised to have escaped, the towhead withdrew. Very deliberately Mr. Foxman lit a cigar, leaned back in his chair, and for a period took mental accounting of his past, his present and his future; and all the while he did this a decision was being forged for him, by that busy devilish little tempter, into shape and point and permanency.

In his fingers he held the means of making himself independent – yes, even rich. Why – he began asking himself the plaguing question and kept on asking it – why should he go on working his life out for twelve thousand dollars a year when, by one safe, secret stroke, he could make twelve times twelve thousand, or very possibly more? He knew what happened to newspaper executives who wore out in the harness. Offhand, he could think of half a dozen who had been as capable as he was, as active and as zealous, and as single-purposed in their loyalty to the sheets they served as he was to this sheet which he served.

All of these men had held high editorial posts and, in their prime, had drawn down big salaries, as newspaper salaries go. Where were they now, since they had grown old? He knew where they were – mighty good and well he knew. One trying to run a chicken farm on Staten Island and daily demonstrating that a man who could manage a newspaper does not necessarily know how to manage a flock of temperamental White Leghorn hens; one an exchange editor, a neglected and unconsidered figure of obscurity, a nonentity almost, and a pensioner, practically, in the same shop whose affairs his slackened old hands had once controlled; one or two more of them actually needy – out of work and out at elbows; and so on, and so forth, through the list.

Well, it rested with Mr. Foxman to avert such a finish to his own career; the instrument fitted to combat the prospect was here in his grasp. Temptation, whispering to him, bade him use it – told him he would be a sorry fool not to use it. What was that line about Opportunity’s knocking once at every man’s door? And what was that other line about there being a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune?

After all, it meant only that he break faith with five men: – with his employer, General Lignum, who trusted him; with his underling, Singlebury, who had done a good job of work for him; and with three others whom, for the sake of convenience, he mentally grouped together – Bogardus and Pratt and Murtha, the lawyer. These three he eliminated from the equation in one puff of blue cigar smoke. For they were all three of them crooks and plotters and double dealers, masters of the dirty trick and the dirty device, who conspired together to serve not the general good, but their own squalid and contemptible ends.

For General Lignum he had more heed. Perhaps I should say here that until this hour this man, Hobart Foxman, had been an honest man – not just reasonably honest but absolutely honest, a man foursquare as a smokehouse. Never before had it occurred to him to figure up to see whether honesty really paid. He did some brisk figuring now.

After all, did it pay? As a reporter, back yonder in the old days when he, a raw cub, first broke into this wearing, grinding newspaper game, he had despised fakers and faking and the petty grafting, the cheap sponging to which he saw some reporters – not many, perhaps, but some – descending. As an assistant sporting editor, after his first promotion from the ranks, he had been content to live upon his somewhat meagre salary, refusing to fatten his income by taking secret pay from prize-fight promoters wishful of getting advertisements dressed up as news stories into the columns of the sporting page. As a staff correspondent, first at Albany and then at Washington, he had walked wide of the lobbyists who sought to corrupt and succeeded in corrupting certain correspondents, and by corrupting them were able sometimes to colour the news, sometimes to suppress it. Always the dispatches he signed had been unbiased, fair, above the board.

To be sure, Foxman had played office politics the while he went up, peg by peg. To men above him he had been the assiduous courtier, crooking the pregnant knee before those who might help him onward. But, then, that was a part of the game – office politics was. Even so, playing it to the top of his bent, he had been on the level. And what had being on the level brought him? It had brought him a place of executive authority and a salary of twelve thousand a year. And these two things – the place and the twelve thousand – he would continue to have and to hold and to enjoy for just so long as he was strong enough to fight off ambitious younger men, climbing up from below as he had climbed; or, worse luck, for just so long as he continued to please the mercurial millionaire who two years earlier, at public outcry, had bought The Clarion, lock, stock and barrel, with its good will and fixtures – just as a man might buy a cow with its calf in the drover’s pen.

That brought him round again to a consideration of General Lignum. Metaphysically he undressed the general and considered him naked. He turned him about and looked at him on every side. The result was not flattering to that impressive and dignified gentleman. Was General Lignum so deserving of consideration? What had General Lignum ever done in all his luxurious days to justify him to a place in the sun? Lignum never worked for his millions; he inherited them. When Lignum bought The Clarion, then as now a losing property, he had been actuated by the same whim which makes a spoiled child crave the costliest toy in the toy shop and, like that spoiled child, he would cast it aside, unmindful of its future, in the same hour that he tired of his newest possession and of the cost of its upkeep.

Wasn’t Lignum lavishing wads of his easy-come, easy-go money on it now, because of his ambition to be a United States senator? Most certainly he was – for that and nothing else. Barring his wealth, which was a gift to him, and his newspaper, which was a plaything, what qualified this dilettante to sit in the seats of the mighty? What did Lignum know of the toil and the sweat and the gifts spent by men, whose names to him were merely items in a pay roll, to make The Clarion a power in the community and in the country? What did he care? In the last analysis what anyhow was this General Robert Bruce Lignum except a bundle of pampered selfishness, wrapped up in a membrane, inclosed in a frock coat and lidded under a high hat? When he got that far Mr. Foxman decided he owed Lignum nothing, as compared with what Lignum owed him. Well, here was a chance to collect the debt, with back dividends and interest accrued. He would collect. He would make himself independent of the whims of Lignum, of the necessity of daily labour, of the uncertainties of his position, of the certainty of the oncoming of age when his hand must tire and his wits grow blunted.

This left to be disposed of – only Singlebury. And Singlebury, in Mr. Foxman’s mind, was now become the least of the factors concerned. In this, his new scheme of things that had sprung full-grown from the loins of a great and a sudden desire, a Singlebury more or less mattered not a whit. In the same moment that he decided to discard Singlebury the means of discarding Singlebury came to him.

That inspiration clarified the situation tremendously, interlocking one part of his plan with the others. In any event the lips of Pratt, Bogardus and Murtha were closed, and their hands tied. By now Lignum was at least a thousand miles out at sea. In the working out of his scheme Foxman would be safe from the meddlings and muddlings of Old Lignum. Already he had begun to think of that gentleman as Old Lignum instead of as General Lignum, so fast were his mental aspects and attitudes altering. Finally, with Singlebury out of the way, the plot would stand up, a completed and almost a perfect edifice.

However, there was one contingency to be dared. In a way it was a risk, yet an inevitable one. No matter what followed he must put the exposé story into print; that absolutely was requisite to the proper development of the plan. For Mr. Foxman well knew the psychological effect of the sight of cold type upon the minds of men planning evil things. He didn’t know John W. Blake personally, but he knew John W. Blake’s kind, and he figured John W. Blake as being in his essentials no different from the run of his kind. Nor was he wrong there, as will appear. Moreover, the risk, while necessary to the carrying out of his present designs, was a risk only in the light of possibilities arising later. Being now fully committed to the venture, he told himself he shouldn’t much care if detection did come after the accomplishment of his purpose. Long before that could happen, he, having made his pile and being secure in the possession of a fortune, would be able to laugh in the faces of his own little world, because anyhow he meant to move on into another circle very soon thereafter. Yes; there was one risk to be taken. On the instant that he arrived at this point in his reasonings he set about taking it.

First off, he read Singlebury’s copy through once more, amending the wording in a few places. He made certain accusations direct and forcible where the reporter, in his carefulness, had been a trifle vague. Then he drew to him a block of copy paper and set about heading and subheading the story. In the days when he sat in the slot of a copy desk Mr. Foxman had been a master hand at headlining; with disuse his knack of hand had not grown rusty. He built and balanced a three-column, three-decker top caption and, to go under it, the heavy hanging indentions and the bold cross lines. From the body of the manuscript, also, he copied off several assertions of a particular emphasis and potency and marked them to go at the top of the story in blackface, with a box about them. This much done, he went to his door and hailed the night city editor, sitting a few yards away.

“Oh, Sloan,” he said, “send a boy upstairs for McManus, will you?”

“McManus isn’t here to-night,” answered Sloan. He got up and came over to his chief. McManus was the make-up editor.

“This isn’t McManus’ night off, is it?” asked Mr. Foxman.

“No, Mac’s sick,” explained Sloan; “he was complaining last night and went home early, and I stayed on to make up his last two pages for him. A little while ago his wife telephoned in from Bayside that he was in bed with a high fever. She said the doctor said it was a touch of malaria and that Mac couldn’t possibly get back to work for a week, anyhow.”

“I see,” said Mr. Foxman slowly. He ran his eye over the city room. “Whom did you put on in his place?”

“Gykeman.”

“Gykeman, eh?” Mr. Foxman considered a moment. This news of McManus’ indisposition pleased him. It showed how willing was Fate to keep on dealing him the winning cards. But Gykeman wasn’t his choice for the task he had in mind; that called for someone of a less inquiring, less curious mind than Gykeman owned. Again his eye ranged the city room. It fell on a swollen and dissipated face, purplish under the electric lights.

“I believe you’d better bring Gykeman back downstairs,” he said, “I want him to read copy on that Wilder poisoning case that’s going to trial to-morrow in General Sessions. Let’s see.” He went through the pretense of canvassing the available material in sight. Then:

“Hemburg will do. Put Hemburg on make-up until Mac is well again.”

“Hemburg?” The city editor’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “I thought you didn’t think very highly of Hemburg, Mr. Foxman.”

“Hemburg’s all right,” said Mr. Foxman crisply; “it’s his personal habits I don’t fancy very much. Still, with half a load on Hemburg is capable enough – and I never saw him with less than half a load on. He can handle the make-up; he used to be make-up man years ago on the old Star-Ledger, it seems to me. Put him on instead of Gykeman – no, never mind; send him in here to me. I’ll tell him myself and give him some good advice at the same time.”

“Well, just as you think best,” said Sloan, miffed that his own selection should have been rejected, but schooled to an unquestioning obedience by the seemingly slack – but really rigorous – discipline of a newspaper shop. “I’ll send him right in.”

Two minutes later Hemburg was standing in an attitude of attention alongside Mr. Foxman’s desk, and from his chair Mr. Foxman was looking up at him steadily.

“Hemburg,” he stated, “I can’t say that I’ve been altogether pleased with you here of late.”

Hemburg put up a splotched, tremulous hand, to hide a weak mouth, and spoke in his own defence from between his fingers.

“Well, I’m sorry if anything has gone wrong, Mr. Foxman,” he began; “I try – ”

“I don’t mean there’s any particular complaint,” stated Mr. Foxman, “only it struck me you’ve been getting into a rut lately. Or that you’ve been going stale – let’s put it that way. On my own judgment I’ve given orders that you are to go on make-up temporarily, beginning to-night. It’s up to you to make good there. If you do make good, when McManus comes back I’ll look round and see if there isn’t something better than a forty-dollar-a-week copy-reading job for you in this office.”

“I’m – I’m certainly obliged to you, Mr. Foxman,” stuttered Hemburg. “I guess maybe I was getting logy. A fellow certainly does get in a groove out there on that copy desk,” he added with the instinct of the inebriate to put the blame for his shortcomings on anything rather than on the real cause of those shortcomings.

“Perhaps so,” said Mr. Foxman; “let’s see if making a change won’t work a cure. Do you see this?” and he put his hand on the sheaf of Singlebury’s copy lying on his desk, under the captions he himself had done. “Well, this may turn out to be the biggest beat and the most important story that we’ve put over in a year. It’s all ready to go to the type-setting machines – I just finished reading copy on it myself. But if it leaks out – if a single word about this story gets out of this building before we’re ready to turn it loose on the street – the man responsible for that leak is going to lose his job no matter who or what he is. Understand?

“Now, then, excepting you and me and the man who wrote it, nobody employed inside this building knows there is such a story. I want you to take it upstairs with you now. Don’t let ’em cut it up into regular takes for the machines. Tell the composing-room foreman – it’ll be Riordan, I guess – that he’s to take his two best machine operators off of whatever they’re doing and put ’em to work setting this story up, and nothing else. Those two men are to keep right at it until it’s done. I want a good, safe-mouthed man to set the head. I want the fastest proofreader up there, whoever that may be, to read the galley proofs, holding copy on it himself. Impress it on Riordan to tell the proofreader, the head setter and the two machine men that they are not to gab to anyone about what they’re doing. When the story is corrected I want you to put it inside a chase with a hold-for-release line on it, and cover it up with print paper, sealed and pasted on, and roll it aside. We’ve already got one hold-for-release yarn in type upstairs; it’s a Washington dispatch dealing with the Mexican situation. Better put the two stories close together somewhere out of the way. Riordan will know where to hide them. Then you bring a set of clean proofs of this story down here to me – to-night. I’ll wait right here for you.

“I’d like to run the thing to-morrow morning, leading with two columns on the front page and a two-column turnover on page two. But I can’t. There’s just one point to be cleared up before it’ll be safe to print it. I expect to clear up that point myself to-morrow. Then if everything is all right I’ll let you know and we’ll probably go to the bat with the story Friday morning; that’ll be day after to-morrow. If it should turn out that we can’t use it I want you to dump the whole thing, head and all, and melt up the lead and forget that such a story ever passed through your hands. Because if it is safe – if we have got all our facts on straight – it’ll be a great beat. But if we haven’t it’ll be about the most dangerous chunk of potential libel that we could have knocking about that composing room. Do you get the point?”

Hemburg said he got it. His instructions were unusual; but, then, from Mr. Foxman’s words and manner, he realised that the story must be a most unusual one too. He carried out the injunctions that had been put upon him, literally and painstakingly. And while so engaged he solemnly pledged himself never again to touch another drop of rum so long as he lived. He had made the same promise a hundred times before. But this time was different – this time he meant it. He was tired of being a hack and a drudge. This was a real opportunity which Mr. Foxman had thrown in his way. It opened up a vista of advancement and betterment before him. He would be a fool not to make the most of it, and a bigger fool still ever to drink again.

Oh, but he meant it! It would be the straight and narrow path for him hereafter; the good old water-wagon for his, world without end, amen. Noticeably more tremulous as to his fingers and his lips, but borne up with his high resolve, he put the clean proofs of the completed story into Mr. Foxman’s hands about midnight, and then hurried back upstairs to shape the layout for the first mail edition.

As Mr. Foxman read the proofs through he smiled under his moustache, and it was not a particularly pleasant smile, either. Printer’s ink gave to Singlebury’s masterpiece a sinister emphasis it had lacked in the typewritten copy; it made it more forceful and more forcible. Its allegations stuck out from the column-wide lines like naked lance tips. And in the top deck of the flaring scare head the name of John W. Blake stood forth in heavy black letters to catch the eye and focus the attention. Mr. Foxman rolled up the proof sheets, bestowed them carefully in the inside breast pocket of his coat, and shortly thereafter went home and to bed.

But not to sleep. Pleasing thoughts, all trimmed up with dollar marks, ran through his head, chasing away drowsiness. All the same he was up at eight o’clock that morning – two hours ahead of his usual rising time. Mrs. Foxman was away paying a visit to her people up-state – another fortunate thing. He breakfasted alone and, as he sipped his coffee, he glanced about him with a sudden contempt for the simple furnishings of his dining room. Well, there was some consolation – this time next year, if things went well, he wouldn’t be slaving his life out for an unappreciative taskmaster, and he wouldn’t be living in this cheap, twelve-hundred-dollar-a-year flat, either. His conscience did not trouble him; from the moment the big notion came to him it had not. Greed had drugged it to death practically instantaneously.

No lees of remorse, no dreggy and bitterish reflections, touching upon the treachery he contemplated and the disloyalty to which he had committed himself, bothered him through that busy day. In his brain was no room for such things, but only for a high cheerfulness and exaltation. To be sure, he was counting his chickens before they were hatched, but the eggs were laid, and he didn’t see how they could possibly addle between now and the tallying time of achieved incubation. So, with him in this frame of mind, the day started. And it was a busy day.

His first errand was to visit the safety-deposit vaults of a bank on lower Broadway. In a box here, in good stable securities of a total value of about sixteen thousand dollars, he had the bulk of his savings. He got them out and took them upstairs, and on a demand note the president of the bank loaned him twelve thousand dollars, taking Mr. Foxman’s stocks and bonds as collateral. In the bank he had as a checking account a deposit somewhat in excess of two thousand dollars. Lying to Mrs. Foxman’s credit was the sum of exactly ten thousand dollars, a legacy from an aunt recently dead, for which as yet Mrs. Foxman and her husband had found no desirable form of investment. Fortunately he held her power of attorney. He transferred the ten thousand from her name to his, which, with what he had just borrowed and what he himself had on deposit, gave him an available working capital of a trifle above twenty-four thousand dollars. He wrote a check payable to bearer for the whole stake and had it certified, and then, tucking it away in his pocket, he went round the corner into Broad Street to call upon John W. Blake at the Blake Bank. The supreme moment toward which he had been advancing was at hand.

As a man of multifarious and varied interests, and all of them important, Mr. Blake was a reasonably busy man. Before now ordinary newspaper men had found it extremely hard to see Mr. Blake. But Mr. Foxman was no ordinary newspaper man; he was the managing editor of The Clarion, a paper of standing and influence, even if it didn’t happen to be a money-maker at present. Across a marble-pillared, brass-grilled barrier Mr. Foxman sent in his card to Mr. Blake and, with the card, the word that Mr. Foxman desired to see Mr. Blake upon pressing and immediate business. He was not kept waiting for long. An office boy turned him over to a clerk and the clerk in turn turned him over to a secretary, and presently, having been ushered through two outer rooms, Mr. Foxman, quite at his ease, was sitting in Mr. Blake’s private office, while Mr. Blake read through the galley proofs of Singlebury’s story to which the caller had invited his attention.

The gentleman’s face, as he read on, gave no index to the feelings of the gentleman. Anyhow, Mr. Blake’s face was more of a manifest than an index; its expression summed up conclusions rather than surmises. As a veteran player – and a highly successful one – in the biggest and most chancy game in the world, Mr. Blake was fortunate in having what lesser gamesters call a poker face. Betraying neither surprise, chagrin nor indignation, he read the article through to the last paragraph of the last column. Then carefully he put the crumpled sheets down on his big desk, leaned back in his chair, made a wedge of his two hands by matching finger tip to finger tip, aimed the point of the wedge directly at Mr. Foxman, and looked with a steadfast eye at his visitor. His visitor looked back at him quite as steadily, and for a moment or two nothing was said.

“Well, Mr. Foxman?” remarked Mr. Blake at length. There was a mild speculation in his inflection – nothing more.

“Well, Mr. Blake?” replied the other in the same casual tone.

“I suppose we needn’t waste any time sparring about,” said Mr. Blake. “I gather that your idea is to publish this – this attack, in your paper?”

“That, Mr. Blake, is exactly my idea, unless” – and for just a moment Mr. Foxman paused – “unless something should transpire to cause me to change my mind.”

“I believe you told me when you came in that at this moment you are in absolute control of the columns and the policy of The Clarion?”

“I am – absolutely.”

“And might it be proper for me to ask when you contemplate printing this article – in what issue?” Mr. Blake was very polite, but no more so than Mr. Foxman. Each was taking the cue for his pose from the other.

“It is a perfectly proper question, Mr. Blake,” said Mr. Foxman. “I may decide to print it day after to-morrow morning. In the event of certain contingencies I might print it to-morrow morning, and again on the other hand” – once more he spoke with deliberate slowness – “I might see my way clear to suppressing it altogether. It all depends, Mr. Blake.”

“Did it ever occur to you that with this warning which you have so kindly given me, I have ample opportunity to enjoin you in the courts from printing all or any part of this article on to-morrow or any subsequent day?”

“You are at perfect liberty to try to enjoin us, Mr. Blake. But did it ever occur to you that such a step wouldn’t help your case in the least? Go ahead and enjoin, Mr. Blake, if you care to, and see what would happen to you in the matter of – well, let us say, undesirable publicity. Instead of one paper printing these facts – for they are facts, Mr. Blake – you would have all the papers printing them in one shape or another.”

“Without arguing that point further just now, might I be allowed to mention that I fail to understand your motive in coming to me, Mr. Foxman, at this time?” said the banker.

“Mr. Blake,” said Mr. Foxman, contemplating the tip of his cigar, “I’ll give you two guesses as to my motive, and your first guess will be the correct one.”

“I see,” stated the other meditatively, almost gently. Then, still with no evidences of heat or annoyance: “Mr. Foxman, there is a reasonably short and rather ugly word to describe what you are driving at. Here in this part of town we call it blackmail.”

“Mr. Blake,” answered the editor evenly, “there is a much shorter and even uglier word which describes your intentions. You will find that word in the second – or possibly it is the third – line of the first paragraph of the matter you have just been reading. The word is ‘steal.’”

“Possibly you are right, Mr. Foxman,” said Mr. Blake dryly. He drew the proof sheets to him, adjusted his glasses and looked at the topmost sheet. “Yes, you are right, Mr. Foxman – I mean about the word in question. It appears in the second line.” He shoved the proofs aside. “It would appear you are a reasonable man – with a business instinct. I flatter myself that I am reasonable and I have been in business a good many years. Now, then, since we appear to be on the point of thoroughly understanding each other, may I ask you another question?”

“You may.”

“What is your price for continuing to be – ahem – reasonable?”

“I can state it briefly, Mr. Blake. Being a newspaper man, I am not a wealthy man. I have an ambition to become wealthy. I look to you to aid me in the accomplishment of that desire. You stand in a fair way to make a great deal of money, though you already have a great deal. I stand in the position not only of being able to prevent you from making that money, but of being able to make a great deal of trouble for you, besides. Or, looking at the other side of the proposition, I have the power to permit you to go ahead with your plans. Whether or not I exercise that power rests entirely with you. Is that quite plain?”

“Very. Pray proceed, Mr. Foxman. You were going to say – ”

“I was going to say that since you hope to make a great deal of money I wish by cooperation with you, as it were, to make for myself a sum which I regard as ample for my present needs.”

“And by ample – you mean what?”

“I mean this: You are to carry me with your brokers for ten thousand shares of the common stock of the Pearl Street trolley line on a ten-point margin. The account may be opened in the name of Mr. X; I, of course, being Mr. X. I apprehend that the party known as X will see his way clear to closing out the account very shortly after the formal announcement of your plans for the East Side transit merger – certainly within a few days. If there should be any losses you will stand them up to and including the ten-point margin. If there should be any profits they go, of course, to Mr. X. I do not anticipate that there will be any losses, and I do anticipate that there will be some profits. In payment for this friendly accommodation on your part, I for my part will engage to prevent the publication in The Clarion, or elsewhere, of the statements contained in those proofs and now standing in type in our composing room, subject to my order to print the story forthwith, or to withhold it, or to kill it outright.”

“Anything else, Mr. Foxman?” inquired Mr. Blake blandly.

“Yes, one other thing: You are to give the necessary order now, in my presence, over the telephone to your brokers. After that you are to go with me to their offices to complete the transaction and to identify me properly as the Mr. X who is to be the owner of this particular account; also you are to explain to them that thereafter the account is subject to my orders and mine alone. I think that will be sufficient.”