Local Color Part 29

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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 appet.i.te, 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 h.e.l.l-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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 senators.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sociates from the possibility of travelling to state's prison, Mr. Blake found it inc.u.mbent 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 a.s.sortment 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.

CHAPTER IX

PERSONA AU GRATIN

To every town, whether great or ungreat, appertain and do therefore belong certain individualistic beings. In the big town they are more or less lost, perhaps. In the smaller town they are readily to be found and as readily to be recognised. There is, for example, the man who, be the weather what it may and frequently is, never wears underwear, yet continues ever to enjoy health so robust as to const.i.tute him, especially in winter time, a living reproach to all his fleece-lined fellow citizens. There is the man who hangs round somebody's livery stable, being without other visible means of support, and makes a specialty of diagnosing the diseases of the horse and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g up fox terrier pups, as regards their ears and tails. Among the neighbouring youth, who yield him a fearsome veneration, a belief exists to the effect that he never removes the tails with an edged tool but just takes and bites them off. There is the man who, because his mother or his wife or his sister takes in sewing, has a good deal of spare time on his hands and devotes it to carving with an ordinary pocketknife--he'll show you the knife--a four-foot chain, complete with solid links and practical swivel ornaments, out of a single block of soft pine, often achieving the even more miraculous accomplishment of creating a full-rigged s.h.i.+p inside of a narrow-mouthed bottle.

There is the man who goes about publicly vainglorious of his owners.h.i.+p of the finest gold-embossed shaving mug in the leading barbershop. There is the man--his name is apt to be A. J. Abbott or else August Ackerman--who invariably refers to himself as the first citizen of the place, and then, to make good his joke, shows the stranger where in the city directory he, like Abou ben Adhem--who, since I come to think about it, was similarly gifted in the matter of initials--leads all the rest.

There is the town drunkard, the town profligate, the town beau, the town comedian. And finally, but by no means least, there is the man who knows baseball from A, which is Chadwick, to Z, which is Weeghman. These others--the champion whittler, the dog-biter, and the whole list of them--are what you might call perennials, but he is a hardy annual, blossoming forth in the spring when the season opens and His Honour, the Mayor, throws out the first ball, attaining to full-petalled effulgence along toward midsummer, as the fight for the flag narrows, growing fluffy in the pod at the seedtime of the World's Series in October, and through the long winter hibernating beneath a rich mulch of Spalding's guides and sporting annuals.

The thriving city of Anneburg, situate some distance south of Mason and Dixon's Line at the point where the Tobacco Belt and the Cotton Belt, fusing imperceptibly together, mingle the nitrogenous weed and the bolled staple in the same patchwork strip of fertile loam lands, was large enough to enjoy a Carnegie library, a munic.i.p.al graft scandal, and a reunion of the Confederate Veterans' a.s.sociation about once in so often, and small enough to have and to hold--and to value--at least one characteristic example of each of the types just enumerated. But especially did it excel in its exclusive possession of J. Henry Birdseye.

This Mr. Birdseye, be it said, was hardly less widely known than a certain former governor of the state, who as the leading citizen of Anneburg took a distinguished part in all civic and communal movements.

Yet the man was not wealthy or eloquent; neither was he learned in the law nor gifted with the pen. His gainful pursuit was that of being a commercial traveller. His business of livelihood was to sell Good Old Mother Menifee's Infallible Chill Cure through nine adjacent counties of the midcontinental malaria zone. But his princ.i.p.al profession was the profession of baseball. In his mind G. O. P. stood for Grand Occidental Pastime, and he always thought of it as spelled with capital letters. He knew the national game as a mother knows the colour of her first-born's eyes. He yearned for it in the off-season interim as a drunkard for his bottle. Offhand he could tell you the exact weight of the bat wielded by Ed Delehanty in 1899 when Ed hit 408; or what Big Dan Brouthers' average was in Big Dan's best year; or where Cap. Anson was born and how he first broke into fast company, and all the lesser circ.u.mstances connected with that paramount event. His was the signature that headed the subscription list which each February secured for Anneburg a members.h.i.+p franchise in a Cla.s.s C League, and he the sincerest mourner when the circuit uniformly blew up with a low, penniless thud toward the Fourth of July.

He glanced at the headlines of the various metropolitan papers for which he subscribed; that was because, as a patriotic and public-spirited American, he deemed it to be his duty to keep abreast of war, crimes, markets, politics, and the other live issues of the day; but what he really read was the sporting department, reading it from the vignette of its chief editor, displayed in the upper left-hand corner, to the sweepings of minute diamond dust acc.u.mulated in the lower right-hand corner.

In short, J. Henry Birdseye was a fan in all that the word implies. In a grist mill, now, a fan means something which winnows out the chaff from the grain. In the Orient a fan means a plane-surface of coloured paper, bearing a picture of a snow-capped mountain, and having also a bamboo handle, and a tendency to come unravelled round the edges. But when anywhere in these United States you speak of a fan, be you a Harlem cliff-swallow or a Bangtown jay, you mean such a one as J. Henry Birdseye. You know him, I know him, everybody knows him. So much being conceded, we get down to our knitting.

Springtime had come: 'twas early April. The robin, which is a harbinger in the North and a potpie in the South, had winged his way from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Central Park, New York, and, stepping stiffly on his frost-bitten toes, was regretting he had been in such a hurry about it. Palm Beach being through and Newport not yet begun, the idle rich were disconsolately reflecting that for them there was nowhere to go except home. That Anglophobiac of the feathered kingdom, the English snipe, bid a reluctant farewell to the Old Southern angleworms whose hospitality he had enjoyed all winter, and headed for Upper Quebec, intent now on family duties. And one morning Mr. Birdseye picked up the Anneburg _Press Intelligencer_, and read that on their homebound journey from the spring training camp the Moguls, league champions four times hand-running and World's Champions every once in a while, were by special arrangement to stop off for half a day in Anneburg and play an exhibition game with the Anneburg team of the K-A-T League.

Nor was it the second-string outfit of the Moguls that would come. That band of callow and diffident rookies would travel north over another route, its members earning their keep by playing match games as they went. No, Anneburg, favoured among the haunts of men, was to be honoured with the actual presence of the regulars, peerlessly captained by that short and wily premier of all baseball premiers, so young in years yet so old in wisdom, Swifty Megrue; and bearing with him in its train such deathless fixtures of the Temple of Fame as Long Leaf Pinderson, the Greatest Living Pitcher, he who, though barely out of his teens, already had made spitball a cherished household word in every American home; Magnus, that n.o.ble Indian, catcher by trade, a red chieftain in his own right; Gigs McGuire, mightiest among keystone bagsmen and wors.h.i.+pped the hemisphere over as the most eminent and at the same time the most cultured umpire-baiter a dazzled planet ever beheld; Flying Jenny Schuster, batsman extraordinary, likewise base-stealer without a peer; Albino Magoon, the Circa.s.sian Beauty of the outfield, especially to be loved and revered because a product of the Sunny Southland; Sauer and Krautman, better known as the Dutch Lunch battery; little Lew Hull, who could play any position between sungarden and homeplate; Salmon, a veritable walloping window-blind with the stick; Jordan, who pitched on occasion, employing a gifted southpaw exclusively therefor; Rube Gracey; Streaky Flynn, always there with the old noodle and fast enough on his feet to be sure of a fixed a.s.signment on almost any other team, but carried in this unparalleled aggregation of stars as a utility player; Andrew Jackson Harkness; Canuck LaFarge, and others yet besides. These mastodons among men would flash across the palpitant Anneburg horizon like a troupe of companion comets, would tarry just long enough to mop up the porous soil of Bragg County with the best defensive the K-A-T had to offer, and then at eventide would resume their journey to where, on the vast home grounds, new glories and fresh triumphs awaited them.

No such honour had ever come to Anneburg before; and as Mr. Birdseye, with quickened pulse, read and then reread the delectable tidings, forgetting all else of lesser import which the _Press Intelligencer_ might contain, a splendid inspiration sprang full-grown into his brain, and in that moment he resolved that her, Anneburg's, honour should be his, J. Henry Birdseye's, opportunity. Opportunity, despite a current impression, does not knock once at every man's door. Belief in the proverb to that effect has spelled many a man's undoing. He has besat him indoors awaiting the sound of her knuckles upon the panels when he should have been ranging afield with his eye peeled. As a seasoned travelling man Mr. Birdseye knew opportunity for what she is--a coy bird and hard to find--and knew that to get her you must go gunning for her.

But he figured he had the proper ammunition in stock to bring down the quarry this time--the suitable salt to put on her tail. Of that also he felt most certain-sure.

The resolution took definite form and hardened. Details, ways and means, probable contingencies and possible emergencies--all these had been mapped and platted upon the blueprints of the thinker's mind before he laid aside the paper. To but one man--and he only under the pledge of a secrecy almost Masonic in its power to bind--did Mr. Birdseye confide the completed plan of his campaign. That man was a neighbour of the Birdseyes, a Mr. Fluellen, more commonly known among friends as Pink Egg Fluellen. The gentleman did not owe his rather startling t.i.tular adornment to any idiosyncrasy of complexion or of physical aspect. He went through life an animate sacrifice to a mother's pride. Because in her veins coursed the blood of two old South Carolina families, the Pinckneys and the Eggners, the misguided woman had seen fit to have the child christened Pinckney Eggner. Under the very lip of the baptismal font the nickname then was born, and through all the days of his fleshy embodiment it walked with him. As a boy, boy-like, he had fought against it; as a man, chastened by the experience of maturity, he had ceased to rebel. Now, as the head of a family, he heard it without flinching.

On his way downtown after breakfast, Mr. Birdseye met Mr. Fluellen coming out of his gate bound in the same direction. As they walked along together Mr. Birdseye told Mr. Fluellen all, first, though, exacting from him a promise which really was in the nature of a solemn oath.

"You see, Pink Egg," amplified Mr. Birdseye when the glittering main fact of his ambition had been revealed, "it'll be like this: The Moguls get in here over the O. & Y. V. at twelve-forty-five that day. Coming from the West, that means they hit Barstow Junction at eleven-twenty and lay over there nine minutes for the northbound connection. Well, I'm making Delhi the day before--seeing my trade there. I drive over to the junction that evening from Delhi--it's only nine miles by buggy--stay all night at the hotel, and when the train with the team gets in next morning, who climbs aboard her? n.o.body but just little old me."

"But won't there be a delegation from here waiting at Barstow to meet 'em and ride in with 'em?"

Mr. Birdseye was wise in the lore of local time cards. He shook his head.

"Not a chance, Pinkie, not a chance. The only way to get out to Barstow from here that morning would be to get up at four o'clock and catch the early freight. No, sir, the crowd here won't see the boys until we all come piling off at the union depot at twelve-forty-five. By that time I'll be calling all those Moguls by their first names. Give me an hour; that's all I ask--just an hour on the same train together with 'em. You know me, and from reading in the papers about 'em, you know about what kind of fellows those Moguls are. Say, Pink Egg, can't you just close your eyes and see the look on Nick Cornwall's face when he and all the rest see me stepping down off that train along with Swifty Megrue and old Long Leaf and the Indian, and all the outfit? I owe Nick Cornwall one anyway. You remember how s.h.i.+rty he got with me last year when I went to him and told him if he'd switch Gillam from short to third and put Husk Blynn second in the batting order instead of fifth, that he'd improve the strength of the team forty per cent. If he'd only a-done that, we'd have been in the money sure. But did he do it? He did not. He told me there was only one manager getting paid to run the club, and so far as he knew he was him. Manager? Huh! Look where we finished--or would have finished if the league had lasted out the season. Eight teams, and us in eighth place, fighting hard not to be in ninth."

"Suppose, though, J. Henry, there just happens to be somebody else from Anneburg on the twelve-forty-five?"

Perhaps it was a tiny spark of envy in Mr. Fluellen's heart which inspired him to raise this second doubt against the certainty of his friend's coup.

"I should worry if there is!" said Mr. Birdseye. "Who else is there in this town that can talk their own language with those boys like I can?

I'll bet you they're so blamed sick and tired of talking with ignorant, uneducated people that don't know a thing about baseball, they'll jump at a chance to a.s.sociate with a man that's really on to every angle of the game--inside ball and averages and standings and all that. Human nature is just the same in a twenty-thousand-a-year big leaguer as it is in anybody else, if you know how to go at him. And if I didn't know human nature from the ground up, would I be where I am as a travelling salesman? Answer me that."

"I guess you're right, J. Henry," agreed Mr. Fluellen. "Gee, I wish I could be along with you," he added wistfully.

Mr. Birdseye shook his head in earnest discount of any such vain cravings upon Mr. Fluellen's part. If there had been the remotest prospect of having Mr. Fluellen for a companion to share in this glory, he wouldn't have told anything about it to Mr. Fluellen in the first place.