Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

“It would seem, Mr. Foxman, that you do not trust me to deal fairly with you in this matter?”

“I do not have to trust you, Mr. Blake. And so I choose not to.”

“Exactly. And what guaranty have I that you will do your part?”

“Only my word, Mr. Blake. You will observe now that the shoe is on the other foot. I do not have to trust you – whereas you do have to trust me. But if you need any guaranty other than the thought of where my self-interest lies in the matter I may tell you that in addition to the stocks which you are to carry for me I intend to invest in Pearl Street common to the full extent of my available cash resources, also on a ten-point margin. Here is the best proof of that.” He hauled out his certified check for twenty-four thousand and some odd dollars and handed it over to Mr. Blake.

Mr. Blake barely glanced at it and handed it back, at the same time reaching for his desk telephone.

“Mr. Foxman,” he said, “there may be some pain but there is also considerable pleasure to me in dealing with a reasonable man. I see that your mind is made up. Why then should we quibble? You win, Mr. Foxman – you win in a walk. Whatever opinions I may entertain as to your private character and whatever opinions you may entertain as to my private character, I may at least venture to congratulate you upon your intelligence. … Oh, yes, while I think of it, there is one other thing, Mr. Foxman: I don’t suppose you would care to tell me just how you came into possession of the information contained in your article?”

“I would not.”

“I thought as much. Excuse me one moment, if you please.” And with that Mr. Blake, still wearing his poker face, joggled the lever of the telephone.

What with certain negotiations, privately conducted and satisfactorily concluded at the brokers’, Mr. Foxman was engaged until well on into the afternoon. This being done, he walked across to the front of the stock exchange, where he found a rank of taxis waiting in line for fares when the market should close. The long, lean months of depression had passed and the broker gentry did not patronise the subway these days. Daily at three o’clock, being awearied by much shearing of woolly, fat sheep, they rode uptown in taxicabs, utterly regardless of mounting motor tariffs and very often giving fat tips to their motor drivers besides. But it is safe to say no broker, however sure he might be of the return of national confidence, gave a fatter tip that day than the one which Mr. Foxman handed to the taxicab driver who conveyed him to his club, in the Upper Forties. Mr. Foxman was in a mood to be prodigal with his small change.

Ordinarily he would have spent an hour or two of the afternoon and all of the evening until midnight or later at The Clarion office. But on this particular day he didn’t go there at all. Somehow, he felt those familiar surroundings, wherein he had worked his way to the topmost peg of authority, and incidentally to the confidence of his employer and his staff, might be to him distastefully reminiscent of former times. Mind you, he had no shame for the thing he had done and was doing; but instead had only a great and splendid exhilaration. Still, he was just as comfortable in his own mind, staying away from that office. It could get along without him for this once. It might as well get used to the sensation anyway; for very shortly, as he figured the prospect, it would have to get along without him.

At his club he ate a belated luncheon and to kill the time played billiards with two other men, playing with his accustomed skill and with a fine show of spirits. Billiards killed the time for him until seven-thirty, which exactly suited his purpose, because at seven-thirty the acting make-up editor should be reporting for duty down at The Clarion shop.

Mr. Foxman entered a sound-proof booth in the little corridor that opened off the main-entry hall of the club and, after calling up the night desk and notifying Sloan he would not come to the office at all that night, asked Sloan to send Hemburg to the telephone.

“Is that you, Hemburg?” he was saying, half a minute later. “Listen, Hemburg, this is very important: You remember that story I turned over to you last night? … Yes, that’s the same one – the story I told you we would run, provided I could establish one main point. Well, I couldn’t establish that point – we can’t prove up on our principal allegation. That makes it dangerous to have the thing even standing in type. So you go upstairs and kill it – kill it yourself with your own hands, I mean. I don’t want to take any chances on a slip-up. Dump the type and have it melted up. And, Hemburg – say nothing to anyone about either the story itself or what has happened to it. Understand me? … Good. And, Hemburg, here’s another thing: You recall the other story that I told you was being held for release – the one on the Mexican situation? It’s got a Washington date line over it. Well, shove it in to-night as your leading news feature. If we hold it much longer it’s liable to get stale – the way things are breaking down there in Mexico. All right; good-bye!”

He had rung off and hung up and was coming out of the little booth when a fresh inspiration came to him and he stepped back in again. One factor remained to be eliminated – Singlebury. Until that moment Mr. Foxman had meant to sacrifice Singlebury by the simple expedient of sending him next day on an out-of-town assignment – over into New Jersey, or up into New England perhaps – and then firing him by wire, out of hand, for some alleged reportorial crime, either of omission or of commission. It would be easy enough to cook up the pretext, and from his chief’s summary dismissal of him Singlebury would have no appeal. But suppose Singlebury came back to town, as almost surely he would, and suppose he came filled with a natural indignation at having been discharged in such fashion, and suppose, about the same time, he fell to wondering why his great story on the Pearl Street trolley steal had not been printed – certainly Singlebury had sense enough to put two and two together – and suppose on top of that he went gabbling his suspicions about among the born gossips of Park Row? It might be awkward.

These were the thoughts that jumped into Mr. Foxman’s mind as he stepped out of the booth, and in the same instant, while he was stepping back in again, he had the answer for the puzzle. Since he meant to make a burnt offering of Singlebury, why not cook him to a cinder and be done with it, and be done with Singlebury too? A method of doing this was the inspiration that came on the threshold of the telephone booth; and when immediately he undertook to put the trick into effect he found it, in its preliminary stages, working with that same satisfactory promise of fulfillment that had marked all his other undertakings, shaping into the main undertaking.

For example, when he called up the Godey Arms Hotel and asked for Mr. Singlebury, which was the thing he next did, the telephone operator of the hotel exchange told him Mr. Singlebury had gone out for the evening, leaving word behind that he would be back at midnight. Now that exactly suited Mr. Foxman. Had Singlebury been in he had meant, on the pretext of desiring to question him later upon some trivial point in the big story, to have Singlebury be at some appointed telephone rendezvous shortly after midnight. But he knew now with reasonable certainty where Singlebury would be during that hour. This knowledge simplified matters considerably; it saved him from the bother of setting the stage so elaborately. Without giving his name to the young woman at the hotel switchboard he asked her to tell Singlebury, upon his return, that a gentleman would call him up on business of importance some time between twelve and one o’clock. She said she would remember the message and, thanking her, he rang off. Well content, he went to a theatre where a farce was playing, sat through the performance and, going back again to his club after the performance, had a late supper in the grill.

At twelve-forty-five he finished his coffee. Entering the telephone booth he got first the Godey Arms upon the wire, and then, after a moment, the waiting and expectant Singlebury. In his mind all evening Mr. Foxman had been carefully rehearsing just what he would say and just how he would say it. Into his voice he put exactly the right strain of hurried, sharp anxiety as he snapped:

“Is that you, Singlebury?”

“Yes, it’s Singlebury,” came back the answer. “That’s you, Mr. Foxman, isn’t it? I rather imagined it would be you from what – ”

Mr. Foxman broke in on him.

“Singlebury, there’s hell to pay about that story you wrote for me. Somebody talked – there was a leak somewhere.”

“On my word of honour, Mr. Foxman,” said the jostled Singlebury, “it wasn’t I. I obeyed your orders to the letter and – ”

“I haven’t time now to try to find out who gabbled,” snapped back Mr. Foxman; “there are things more important to consider. About half-past seven to-night – that was when I first tried to reach you from down here at the office – I got wind that Blake’s crowd had found out about our surprise and were getting busy. That was what I’d been afraid of, as I told you. In the fear that they might try to enjoin us if we held off publication any longer I gave orders to slam the story into the early-mail edition that went to press twenty minutes ago. And now – now when the mischief is done – when thousands of papers are already printed – I find out that we’ve committed criminal libel, and the worst kind of criminal libel – not against Blake – we are safe enough there – but against Eli Godfrey, Senior, one of the biggest lawyers in this town. In your story you accused him of being one of the lawyers who helped to frame this deal. That’s what you did!”

“Yes – but – why – but” – stammered Singlebury – “but, Mr. Foxman, Eli Godfrey, Senior, was the man. He was – wasn’t he? All my information was – ”

“It was his son, Eli Godfrey, Junior, his partner in the firm,” declared Mr. Foxman, lying beautifully and convincingly. “That’s who it was. The father had nothing to do with it; the son everything. You got the whole thing twisted. I’ve snatched the forms back and I’m throwing the story out of the second edition and filling the hole with a Washington story that we happened to have handy. So your story probably won’t be in the edition that you will see. But that doesn’t help much – if any. We’ve kept the libel out of our local circulation, but it’s already in the early mails and we can’t catch up with it or stop it there. It’s too late to save us or to save you.”

“To save me?”

“That’s what I said. I guess you don’t know what the laws against criminal libel in this state are? The Clarion will be sued to the limit, that’s sure. But, as the man who wrote the story, you can be sent to the penitentiary under a criminal prosecution for criminal libel. Do you understand – to the penitentiary? I’m liable, too, in a way of course – anybody who had anything to do with uttering or circulating the false statement is liable. But you are in worse than the rest of us.”

In his room at the other end of the wire panic gripped poor Singlebury. With a feeling that the earth had suddenly slumped away from under his feet he clung desperately to the telephone instrument. He had accepted this terrifically startling disclosure unquestioningly. Why should he question it?

“But if – if there was no malice – if the mistake was made innocently and in ignorance – ” he babbled.

In his place in the club telephone booth Mr. Foxman, interpreting the note of fright in the reporter’s voice, grinned to himself. Singlebury, it was plain, didn’t know anything about libel law. And Singlebury, it was equally plain, was accepting without question or analysis all that he was hearing.

“Lack of malice doesn’t excuse in this state!” Mr. Foxman said, speaking with grim menace; “you haven’t a leg to stand on. There’ll be warrants out before breakfast time in the morning; and by noon you’ll be in a jail cell unless you get out of this town to-night before they find out the name of the man who wrote this story. Have you got any money?”

“I’ve – I’ve got some money,” answered Singlebury, shaping the words with difficulty. “But, Mr. Foxman, if I’m responsible I can face the consequences. I’m willing to – ”

“Singlebury, I’m telling you that you haven’t a chance. I sent you out on this story – that was my mistake – and you got your facts twisted – that was your mistake. Even so, I don’t want to see you suffer. I tell you you haven’t a show if you stay in this state ten hours longer. You’ll wear stripes. I’m warning you – giving you this chance to get away while there’s still time – because you’re a young man, a stranger in this community, with no influence to help you outside of what The Clarion could give you, and that would be mighty little. The Clarion will be in bad enough itself. The man who owns this paper would sacrifice you in a minute to save himself or his paper. He can’t afford to throw me to the lions, but with you it’s different. If you beat it he may make a scapegoat of you, but it’ll be at long distance where it won’t hurt you much. If you stay you’ll be a scapegoat just the same – and you’ll serve time besides. Because I can’t help feeling sorry for you I’m offering you a chance by giving you this warning.”

“I’ll go then – I’ll go right away, I’ll do as you say, sir. What – what would you suggest?”

“If I were you I’d catch a ferry for the Jersey shore before daylight – they run all night, the ferries do. And as soon as I landed on the Jersey shore I’d catch a train for the West or the South or somewhere and I’d stay on it till it stopped, no matter how far it took me – the farther from this town the better. And for the time being I’d change my name – that’s my parting confidential advice to you. Good-bye. I’ve wasted more time already than I can spare.” And having, as he figured, chosen the proper moment for ringing off, Mr. Foxman accordingly rang off.

But he made sure of the last detail – this calculating, foreseeing, prudent man. It was less than six blocks from his club to Singlebury’s hotel. He drove the distance as speedily as a motor could carry him and, halting the taxi he had hired in the quiet street on the opposite side of the roadway, he, hidden in its interior, sat waiting and watching through the cab window; until, a little later, he saw Singlebury issue from the doorway of the Godey Arms, carrying a valise in his hand, saw him climb into a hansom cab and saw him drive away, heading westward.

By Mr. Foxman’s directions his own cab trailed the cab bearing the other right to the ferry. Not until his eyes had followed the diminishing figure of the reporter while it vanished into the ferry house did he give orders to his driver to take him home to his apartment. Seasoned and veteran nighthawk of the Tenderloin that he was, the driver concerned himself not a bit with the peculiar conduct of any passenger of his. He did simply as he was told. If he was paid his legal fare and a sufficient tip besides, he could forget anything that happened while he and his chariot were under charter. For a sufficiently attractive bonus he would have winked at manslaughter. That was his code.

Being deposited at his home shortly before three A. M., Mr. Foxman became aware of a let-down sensation. With the strain relieved he felt the after-effects of the strain. He was sleepy and he was very tired; likewise very happy. Not a slip had occurred anywhere. Blake had been tractable and Singlebury had been credulous, and Hemburg, of course, had been obedient. The story would never see daylight, the big merger would be announced according to schedule, and Pearl Street common would go kiting up thirty or forty, or maybe fifty points. And he was loaded to the gunwales with the stock – bought at nineteen and three-quarters. For obvious reasons Blake would keep his mouth shut; for other reasons, just as good, Pratt, Bogardus and Murtha would keep their mouths closed too. They might, in private, indulge in a spell of wonderment, but they would do their wondering where no outsider overheard it – that was sure.

Hemburg, who travelled in an alcoholic maze anyhow, doing as he was told and asking no questions, would not be apt to talk. Why should he talk? Moreover, upon some plausible excuse Mr. Foxman meant that Hemburg and The Clarion should shortly part company. General Lignum, happily, would be absent from the country for at least a month and possibly for six weeks. If by the time he returned he hadn’t forgotten all about the East Side traction business it would be easy enough to make him forget about it. Pulling wool over Lignum’s eyes should be the easiest of jobs. Lignum would be having his political ambitions to think about; one beat more or less would mean nothing to Lignum, who had no journalistic instincts or training anyway.

As for Singlebury – well, the coup by which that young man had been disposed of was the smartest trick of them all, so Mr. Foxman told himself. Every avenue leading to possible detection was closed up, blocked off and sealed shut. In any event he, Hobart Foxman, was bound to make his pile; it was highly probable that there would be no price to pay in the subsequent loss of Hobart Foxman’s professional reputation. He had been prepared, if need be, to surrender his good name in exchange for a fortune, but if he might have both – the name and the fortune – so much the better for Hobart Foxman.

He hummed a cheerful little tune as he undressed himself and got into bed. There he slept like a dead man until the long hand of the clock had circled the clock face a good many times.

It was getting along toward eleven o’clock in the forenoon and the summer sunlight, slipping through chinks in the curtains at the windows of his bedroom, had patterned the bed covers with yellow stencillings when Mr. Foxman awoke. For a spell he yawned and stretched. Then, in his slippers and his dressing gown, he went through the hall to the dining room to tell the maid out in the kitchen she might serve him his breakfast. According to the rule of the household copies of all the morning papers were lying at his place on the dining table. There was quite a sizable heap of them. The Clarion, folded across, made the topmost layer of the pile. Governed more by a habit of long standing than by any active desire to see what it contained, he picked it up and opened it out.

Out in the kitchen the maid heard some one in the dining room give a queer strangled cry. She came running. Her master stood in the middle of the floor with an opened newspaper in his two shaking hands. He didn’t seem to see her, didn’t seem to hear the astonished bleat which promptly she uttered; but above the rim of the printed sheet she saw his face. She saw it in the first instant of entering, and for sundry succeeding seconds saw nothing else. It was a face as white as so much chalk, and set in it a pair of eyes that popped from their sockets and glared like two shiny, white-ringed, agate marbles, and at its lower end a jaw that lolled down until it threatened self-dislocation. The maid figured Mr. Foxman had been rendered suddenly and seriously unwell by something shocking he had found in the paper.

Therein she was right; it was a true diagnosis if ever there was one. Mr. Foxman had been suddenly and sorely stricken in the midst of health and contentment; Mr. Foxman was now seriously unwell, both physically and as to the state of his nervous system.

Indeed the gentleman was in even more deplorable case than the foregoing words would indicate. Mr. Foxman was the engineer who is hoisted by his own petard. He was the hunter who falls into the pitfall he himself has digged, who is impaled on the stake he himself has planted. He was the hangman who chokes in the noose he wove for other victims. In short, Mr. Foxman was whatever best describes, by simile and comparison, the creature which unexpectedly is wrecked and ruined by contrivances of its own devisement.

At the top of the first page of The Clarion, smeared across three columns in letters which, to Mr. Foxman’s petrified gaze, seemed cubits high, ran a certain well-remembered scare head, and under that, in two-column measure, a box of black-faced type, and under that, with its accusations bristling out from the body matter like naked lance tips, followed the story which told of the proposed Pearl Street trolley grab and the proposed East Side merger steal.

All of it was there, every word of it, from the crackling first paragraph to the stinging wasp tail of the last sentence!

The telephone has played a considerable part in this recital. It is to play still one more part and then we are done with telephones.

Mr. Foxman regained the faculty of consecutive thought – presently he did. He ran to the telephone, and after a little time during which he wildly blasphemed at the delay he secured connection with the office of the firm of brokers who carried the account of Mr. X.

It was too late to save anything from the wreckage; the hour for salvaging had gone by. A clerk’s voice, over the wire, conveyed back the melancholy tidings. A bomb had burst in Wall Street that morning. The East Side merger scheme had been blown into smithereens by a sensational story appearing in The Clarion, and the fragments still were falling in a clattering shower on the floor of the stock exchange. As for Pearl Street trolley common, that had gone clear through to the basement. The last quotation on this forsaken stock had been seven and a half asked, and nothing at all offered.

The account of Mr. X, therefore, was an account no longer; it was off the books. Mr. X’s ten-point margin having been exhausted, Mr. X had been closed out, and to all intents and purposes neither he nor his account any longer existed.

Mr. Foxman’s indisposition increased in the intensity of its visible symptoms until the alarmed maid, standing helplessly by, decided that Mr. Foxman was about to have a stroke of some sort. As a matter of fact he had already had it – two strokes really, both of them severe ones.

We go back a little now – to the evening before. We go back to the alcoholic Hemburg, trying to make good in his ad-interim eminence as acting make-up editor and, in pursuance of this ambition, riding for the time being upon the water wagon, with every personal intention of continuing so to ride during all time to come.

When he came on duty shortly after seven o’clock every famished, tortured fibre in him was calling out for whiskey. His thirst was riding him like an Old Man of the Seas. He sweated cold drops in his misery and, to bolster his resolution, called up every shred of moral strength that remained to him. Inside him a weakened will fought with an outraged appetite, and his jangled nerves bore the stress of this struggle between determination and a frightful craving.

In this state then, with his brain cells divided in their allegiance to him and his rebellious body in a tremor of torment, he was called upon very soon after his arrival at the office to carry out an important commission for the man who had bestowed upon him his temporary promotion. Taking the command over the wire, he hurried upstairs to execute it.

Had he been comparatively drunk it is certain that Hemburg would have made no slip; automatically his fuddled mind would have governed his hand to mechanical obedience of the direction. But being comparatively sober – as sober as nearly twenty-four hours of abstinence could make him – poor Hemburg was in a swirl of mental confusion. At that, out-mastered as he was, he made only one mistake.

There were two stories lying in type, side by side, on the stone. One of them was to be played up in the leading position in the make-up. The other was to be dumped in the hell-box. That was the order, plain enough in his own mind. So one of them he dumped, and the other one he put in the forms to be printed.

The mistake he made was this: He dumped the wrong one and he ran the wrong one. He dumped the long Washington dispatch into a heap of metal linotype strips, fit only to be melted back again into leaden bars, and he ran the Singlebury masterpiece. That’s what Hemburg did – that’s all.

Well then, these things resulted: Mrs. Foxman lost her ten-thousand-dollar legacy and never thereafter forgave her husband for frittering away the inheritance in what she deemed to have been a mad fit of witless speculation. Even though his money had gone with hers she never forgave him.

Mr. Foxman, having sold his birthright of probity and honour and self-respect for as bitter and disappointing a mess of pottage as ever mortal man had to swallow, nevertheless went undetected in his crookedness and continued to hold his job as managing editor of The Clarion.

General Robert Bruce Lignum, a perfectly innocent and well-meaning victim, was decisively beaten in his race for the United States senatorship. Mr. Blake saw to that personally – Mr. John W. Blake, who figured that in some way he had been double-crossed and who, having in silence nursed his grudge to keep it warm, presently took his revenge upon Foxman’s employer, since he saw no way, in view of everything, of hurting Foxman without further exposing himself. Also, to save himself and his associates from the possibility of travelling to state’s prison, Mr. Blake found it incumbent upon him to use some small part of his tainted fortune in corrupting a district attorney, who up until then had been an honourable man with a future before him of honourable preferment in the public service. So, though there were indictments in response to public clamour, there were no prosecutions, and the guilty ones went unwhipped of justice. And after a while, when the popular indignation engendered by The Clarion’s disclosure had entirely abated, and the story was an old story, and the law’s convenient delays had been sufficiently invoked, and a considerable assortment of greedy palms at Albany and elsewhere had been crossed with dirty dollars, the East Side merger, in a different form and with a different set of dummy directors behind it, was successfully put through, substantially as per former programme. But by that time the original holders of Pearl Street trolley stocks had all been frozen out and had nothing to show for their pains and their money, except heart pangs and an empty bag to hold.

Bogardus, the lobbyist, and old Pratt, the class leader, and Lawyer Murtha, the two-faced – not one of whom, judged by the common standards of honest folk, had been actuated by clean motives – enjoyed their little laugh at Blake’s passing discomfiture, but afterward, as I recall, they patched up their quarrels with him and each, in his own special field of endeavour, basked once more in the golden sunshine of their patron’s favour, waxing fat on the crumbs which dropped from the greater man’s table.

Hemburg’s reward for striving, however feebly, to cure himself of the curse of liquor was that promptly he lost his place on The Clarion’s staff – Mr. Foxman personally attended to that detail – and because of his habits could not get a job on any other paper and became a borrower of quarters along Park Row.

Singlebury, who did a good reporter’s job and wrote a great story, was never to have the small consolation of knowing that after all he had not committed criminal libel, nor that he had not got his names or his facts twisted, nor even that his story did appear in The Clarion. Without stopping long enough even to buy a copy of the paper, he ran away, a fugitive, dreading the fear of arrest that had been conjured up in another’s imagination and craftily grafted upon his beguiled intelligence. And he never stopped running, either, until he was in Denver, Colorado, where he had to make a fresh start all over again. While he was making it the girl in San Jose , California, got tired of waiting for him and broke off the engagement and married someone else.

What is the moral of it all?

You can search me.