By Irvin S. Cobb
AS THE Daily Evening News, with pardonable enthusiasm, pointed out at the time, three events of practically national importance took place in town all in that one week. On Tuesday night at 9:37 there was a total eclipse of the moon, not generally visible throughout the United States; on Wednesday morning the Tri-State Steam and Hand Laundrymen’s Association began a two-days annual convention at St. Clair Hall; and on Saturday at high noon Eastern capital, in the person of J. Hayden Witherbee, arrived.
And the greatest of these was Witherbee. The eclipse of the moon took place on its appointed schedule and was witnessed through opera glasses and triangular fragments of windowpane that had been smudged with candlesmoke. The Tri-State Laundrymen came and heard reports, elected officers, had a banquet at the Richland House and departed to their several homes. But J. Hayden Witherbee stayed on, occupying the bridal chamber at the hotel—the one with the private bath attached; and so much interest and speculation did his presence create, and so much space did the Daily Evening News give in its valued columns to his comings and goings and his sayings and doings, that the name of J. Hayden Witherbee speedily became, as you might say, a household word throughout the breadth and length of the Daily Evening News’ circulation.
It seemed that J. Hayden Witherbee, sitting there in his lofty office building far away in Wall Street, New York, had had his keen eye upon the town for some time; and yet—such were the inscrutable methods of the man—the town hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t even suspected it. However, he had been watching its growth with the deepest interest; and when, by the count of the last United States census, it jumped from seventh in population in the state to fifth he could no longer restrain himself. He got aboard the first train and came right on. He had, it would appear, acted with such promptness because, in his own mind, he had already decided that the town would make an ideal terminal point for his proposed Tobacco & Cotton States Interurban Trolley line, which would in time link together with twin bonds of throbbing steel—the words are those of the reporter for the Daily Evening News—no less-than twenty-two growing towns, ranging southward from the river. Hence his presence, exuding from every pore, as it were, the very essences of power and influence and money. The paper said he was one of the biggest men in Wall Street, a man whose operations had been always conducted upon the largest scale.
This, within the space of three or four months, had been our second experience of physical contact with Eastern capital. The first one, though, had been in the nature of a disappointment. A man named Betts—Henry Betts—had come down from somewhere in the North and, for a lump sum, had bought outright the city gasworks. It was not such a big lump sum, because the gasworks had been built right after the war and had thereafter remained untouched by the stimulating hand of improvement. They consisted in the main of a crumbly little brick engine house, full of antiquated and self-willed machinery, and just below it, on the riverbank, a round and rusted gas tank, surrounded by sloping beds of coal cinders, through which at times sluggish rivulets of molten coal tar percolated like lava on the flanks of a toy volcano. The mains took in only the old part of town—not the new part; and the quality of illumination furnished was so flickery at all seasons and so given to freezing up in winter that many subscribers, including even the leading families, used coal-oil lamps in their bedchambers until the electric power house was built. A stock company of exceedingly conservative business men had owned the gasworks prior to the advent of Henry Betts, and the general manager of the plant had been Cassius Poindexter, a fellow townsman. Cash Poindexter was a man who, in his day, had tried his ‘prentice hand at many things. At one time he traveled about in a democrat wagon, taking orders for enlarging crayon portraits from photographs and tintypes, and also for the frames to accompany the same.
At a more remote period he had been the authorized agent, on commission, for a lightning-rod company, selling rods with genuine guaranteed platinum tips; and rusty iron stringers, with forked tails, which still adhered to outlying farm buildings here and there in the county, testified to his activities in this regard. Again, Cash Poindexter had held the patent rights in four counties for an improved cream separator. In the early stages of the vogue for Belgian-hare culture in this country he was the first to import a family group of these interesting animals into our section. He had sold insurance of various sorts, including life, fire and cyclone; he was a notary public; he had tried real estate, and he had once enjoyed the distinction of having read lawbooks and works on medicine simultaneously. But in these, his later years, he had settled down more or less and had become general manager of the gasworks, which position also included the keeping of the books, the reading of meters and the making out and collecting of the monthly accounts. Nevertheless, he was understood to be working at spare moments on an invention that would make him independently wealthy for life. He was a tall, thin, sad man, with long, drooping aide whiskers; and he was continually combing back his side whiskers with both hands caressingly, and this gave him the appearance of a man parting a pair of string portières and getting ready to walk through them, but never doing so.
When this Mr. Betts came down from the North and bought the gasworks it was the general expectation that he would extensively overhaul and enlarge the plant; but he did nothing of the sort, seeming, on the contrary, to be amply satisfied with things as they were. He installed himself as general manager, retained Cash Poindexter as his assistant, and kept right on with the two Kettler boys as his engineers and the two darkies, Ed Greer and Lark Tilghman, as his firemen. He was a man who violated all traditions and ideals concerning how Northern capitalists ought to look. He neither wore a white piqué vest nor smoked long, black cigars; in fact, he didn’t smoke at all. He was a short, square, iron-gray person, with a sort of dead and fossilized eye. He looked as though he might have been rough-hewn originally from one of those soapstone days which grow the harder with age and exposure. He had a hard, exact way of talking, and he wore a hard, exact suit of clothes which varied not, weekdays or Sundays, in texture or in cut.
In short, Mr. Henry Betts, the pioneer Eastern investor in those parts, was a profound disappointment as to personality and performances. Not so with J. Hayden Witherbee. From his Persian-lamb lapels to his patent-leather tips he was the physical embodiment of all the town had learned to expect of a visiting Wall Street capitalist. And he liked the town—that was plain. He spoke enthusiastically of the enterprise which animated it; he referred frequently and with praise to the awakening of the New South, and he was even moved to compliment publicly the cooking at the Richland House. It was felt that a stranger and a visitor could go no further.
Also, he moved fast, J. Hayden Witherbee did, showing the snap and push so characteristic of the ruling spirits of the great moneymarts of the East. Before he had been in town a week he had opened negotiations for the purchase outright of the new Light and Power Company, explaining frankly that if he could come to terms he intended making it a part of his projected interurban railway. Would the present owners care to sell at a fair valuation?—that was what Mr. Witherbee desired to know.
Would a drowning man grasp at a life-preserver? Would a famished colt welcome the return of its maternal parent at eventide? Would the present owners, carrying on their galled backs an unprofitable burden which local pride had forced upon them—would they sell? Here, as manna sent from Heaven by way of Wall Street, as you might say, was a man who would buy from them a property which had never paid and which might never pay; and who, besides, meant to do something noble and big for the town. Would they sell? Ask them something hard!
There was a series of conferences—if two conferences can be said to constitute a series—one in Mr. Witherbee’s room at the hotel, where cigars of an unknown name but an impressive bigness were passed round freely; and one in the office of the president of the Planters’ National Bank. Things went well and swimmingly from the first; Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee had a most clear and definite way of putting things; and yet, with all that, he was the embodiment of cordiality and courtesy. So charmed was Doctor Lake with his manner that he asked him, right in the midst of vital negotiations, if he were not of Southern descent; and when he confessed that his mother’s people had come from Virginia Doctor Lake said he had felt it from the first moment they met, and insisted on shaking hands with Mr. Witherbee again.
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Witherbee—this was said at the first meeting, the one in his room—“as I have already told you, I need this town as a terminal for my interurban road and I need your plant. I expect, of course, to enlarge it and to modernize it right up to the minute; but, so far as it goes, it is a very good plant and I want it. I suggest that you gentlemen, constituting the directors and the majority stockholders, get together between now and tomorrow—this evening, say—and put a price on the property. Tomorrow I will meet you again, here in this hotel or at any point you may select; and if the price you fix seems fair, and the papers prove satisfactory to my lawyers, I know of no reason why we cannot make a trade. Gentlemen, good day. Take another cigar all round before leaving.” They went apart and confabbed industriously—old Major Covington, who was the president of the Light and Power Company Doctor Lake and Captain Woodward, the two heaviest stockholders, Colonel Courtney Cope, the attorney for the company and likewise a director, and sundry others. Between themselves, being meanwhile filled with sweet and soothing thoughts, they named a price that would let them out whole, with a margin of interest on the original venture, and yet one which, everything considered—the growing population, the new suburbs and all that—was a decent enough price. They expected to be hammered down a few thousand and were prepared to concede something; but it would seem that the big men of the East did not do business in that huckstering, cheese-trimming way. Time to them was evidently worth more than the money to be got by long chaffering over a proposition.
“Gentlemen,” J. Hayden Witherbee had said right off, “the figures seem reasonable and moderate. I think I will buy from you.” A warm glow visibly lit up the faces of those who sat with him. It was as though J. Hayden Witherbee was an open fireplace and threw off a pleasant heat.
“I will take over these properties,” repeated Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee; “but on one condition—I also want the ownership of your local gasworks.”
There was a little pause and the glow died down a trifle—just the merest trifle. “But, sir, we do not own those gasworks,” said the stately Major Covington.
“I know that,” said Mr. Witherbee; “but the point is—can’t you acquire them?”
“I suppose we might,” said the major; “but, Mr. Witherbee, that gasworks concern is worn out—our electric-light plant has nearly put it out of business.”
“I understand all that too,” Mr. Witherbee went on, “perfectly well. Gentlemen, where I come from we act quickly, but we look before we leap. During the past twenty-four hours I have examined into the franchise of those gasworks. I find that nearly forty years ago your common council issued to the original promoters and owners of the gas company a ninety-year charter, giving the use of any and all of your streets, not only for the laying of gas mains, but for practically all other purposes. It was an unwise thing to do, but it was done and it stands so today. Gentlemen, this is a growing community in the midst of a rich country. I violate no confidence in telling you that capital is looking this way. I am merely the forerunner—the first in the field. The Gatins crowd, in Chicago, has its eyes upon this territory, as I have reason to know. You are, of course, acquainted with the Gatins crowd?” he said in a tone of putting a question.
Major Covington, who made a point of never admitting that he didn’t know everything, nodded gravely and murmured the name over to himself as though he were trying to remember Gatins’ initials. The others sat silent, impressed more than ever with the wisdom of this stranger who had so many pertinent facts at his finger tips.
“Suppose now,” went on Mr. Witherbee—“suppose, now, that Ike Gratins and his crowd should come down here and find out what I have found out and should buy out that gas company. Why, gentlemen, under the terms of that old franchise, those people could actually lay tracks right through the streets of this little city of yours. They could parallel our lines—they could give us active opposition right here on the home ground. It might mean a hard fight. Therefore I need those gasworks. I may shut them up or I may run them—but I need them in my business.
“I have inquired into the ownership of this concern,” continued Mr. Witherbee before any one could interrupt him, “and I find it was recently purchased outright by a gentleman from somewhere up my way named—named—” He snapped his fingers impatiently.
“Named Betts,” supplied Doctor Lake—“named Henry Betts.”
“Quite so,” Mr. Witherbee assented. “Thank you, doctor—Betts is the name. Now the fact that the whole property is vested in one man simplifies the matter—doesn’t it? Of course I would not care to go to this Mr. Betts in person. You understand that.” If they didn’t understand they let on they did, merely nodding and waiting for more light to be let in.
“Once let it be known that I was personally interested in a consolidation of your lighting plants, and this Mr. Betts, if I know anything about human nature, would advance his valuation far beyond its proper figure. Therefore I cannot afford to be known in the matter. You see that?”
They agreed that they saw.
“So I would suggest that all of you—or some of you—go and call upon Mr. Betts and endeavor to buy the gasworks from him outright. If you can get the plant for anything like its real value you may include the amount in the terms of the proposition you have today made me and I will take over all of the properties together.
“However, remember this, gentlemen—there is need of haste. Within forty-eight hours I should be in Memphis, where I am to confer with certain of my associates—Eastern men like myself, but who, unlike me, are keeping under cover—to confer with them concerning our rights-of-way through the cotton-raising country. I repeat, then, that there is pressing need for immediate action. May I offer you gentlemen fresh cigars?” and he reached for a well-stuffed, silver-mounted case of dull leather.
But they were already going—going in a body to see Mr. Henry Betts, late of somewhere up North. Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee’s haste, great though it might be, could be no greater than theirs. On their way down Market Street to the gashouse it was decided that, unless the exigencies of the situation demanded a chorus of argument, Major Covington should do the talking. Indeed it was Major Covington who suggested this. Talking, with financial subjects at the back of the talk, was one of the things at which the major fancied himself a success.
Mr. Betts sat in the clutter of his small, untidy office like an elderly and reserved gray rat in a paper nest behind a wainscoting. His feet, in square-toed congress gaiters, rested on the fender of a stove that was almost small enough to be an inkstand, and his shoulders were jammed back against a window-ledge. By merely turning his head he commanded a view of his entire property, with the engine house in the near distance and the round tunlike belly of the gas tank rising just beyond it. He was alone.
As it happened, he knew all of his callers, having met them in the way of business—which was the only way he ever met anybody. To each man entering he vouchsafed the same greeting—namely, “How-do?”—spoken without emotion and mechanically.
Major Covington had intended to shake hands with Mr. Betts, but something about Mr. Betts’ manner made him change his mind. He cleared his throat impressively; the major did nearly everything impressively.
“A fine day, sir,” said the major.
Mr. Betts turned his head slightly to the left and peered out through a smudged pane as if seeking visual confirmation of the statement before committing himself. A look seemed to satisfy him.
“It is,” he agreed, and waited, boring his company with his geologic gaze.
“Ahem!” sparred Major Covington—“think I will take a chair.”
As Mr. Betts said nothing to this, either one way or the other, the major took a chair, it being the only chair in sight, with the exception of the chair in which Mr. Betts was slumped down and from which Mr. Betts had not stirred. Doctor Lake perched himself upon a bookkeeper’s tall stool that wabbled precariously. Three other anxious local capitalists stood where they could find room, which was on the far side of the stove.
“Very seasonable weather indeed,” ventured the old major, still fencing for his start.
“So you remarked before, I believe,” said Mr. Betts dryly. “Did you wish to see me on business?”
Inwardly ‘the major was remarking to himself how astonishing it was that one section of the country—to wit, the North—could produce men of such widely differing types as this man and the man whose delightful presence they had just quitted; could produce a gentleman like J. Hayden Witherbee, with whom it was a positive pleasure to discuss affairs of moment, and a dour, sour, flinty person like this Betts, who was lacking absolutely in the smaller refinements that should govern intercourse between gentlemen—and wasn’t willing to learn them either. Outwardly the major, visibly flustered, was saying: “Yes—in a measure. Yes, we came on a matter of business.” He pulled up somewhat lamely. Really the man’s attitude was almost forbidding. It verged on the sinister.
“What was the business?” pressed Mr. Betts in a colorless and entirely disinterested tone of voice.
“Well, sir,” said Major Covington stiffly, and his rising temper and his sense of discretion were now wrestling together inside of him—“well, sir, to be brief and to put it in as few words as possible, which from your manner and conversation I take to be your desire, I—we—my associates here and myself—have called in to say that we are interested naturally in the development of our little city and its resources and its industries; and with these objects in view we have felt, and, in fact, we have agreed among ourselves, that we would like to enter into negotiations with you, if possible, touching, so to speak, on the transfer to us of the property which you control here. Or, in other words, we—”
“Do you mean you want to buy these gasworks?”
“Yes,” confessed the major; “that—that is it. We would like to buy these gasworks.”
“Immediately!” blurted out Doctor Lake, teetering on his high perch. The major shot a chiding glance at his compatriot. Mr. Betts looked over the top of the stove at the major, and then beyond him at the doctor, and then beyond the doctor at the others. Then he looked out of the window again.
“They are not for sale,” he stated; and his voice indicated that he regarded the subject as being totally exhausted.
“Yes, quite so; I see,” said Major Covington suavely; “but if we could agree on a price now—a price that would be satisfactory to you—and to us—”
“We couldn’t agree on a price,” said Mr. Betts, apparently studying something in connection with the bulging side of the gas tank without, “because there isn’t any price to agree on. I bought these gasworks and I own them, and I am satisfied to go on owning them. Therefore they are not for sale. Did you have any other business with me?”
There was something almost insulting in the way this man rolled his r’s when he said “therefore.” Checking an inclination to speak on the part of Doctor Lake the major controlled himself with an effort and said:
“Nevertheless, we would appreciate it very much, sir, if you could and would go so far as to put a figure—any reasonable figure—on this property.. We would like very much to get an expression from you—a suggestion—or—or—something of that general nature,” he tailed off.
“Very well,” said Mr. Betts, biting the words off short and square, “very well. I will What you want to know is my price for these gasworks?”
“Exactly so,” said the major, brightening up.
“Very well,” repeated Mr. Betts. “Sixty thousand.”
Doctor Lake gave such a violent start that he lost his hat out of his lap. Captain Woodward’s jaw dropped.
“Sixty thousand!” echoed Major Covington blankly. “Sixty thousand what?”
“Sixty thousand dollars,” said Mr. Betts, “in cash.”
Major Covington fairly sputtered surprise and chagrin.
“But, Mr. Betts, sir,” he protested, “I happen to know that less than four months ago you paid only about twenty-seven thousand dollars for this entire business!”
“Twenty-six thousand five hundred, to be exact,” corrected Mr. Betts.
“And since that time you have not added a dollar’s worth of improvement to it,” added the dismayed major.
“Not one cent—let alone a dollar,” assented this most remarkable man.
“But surely you don’t expect us to pay such a price as that?” pleaded tie major.
“I do not,” said Mr. Betts.
“We couldn’t think of paying such a price as that.”
“I don’t expect you to,” said Mr. Betts. “I didn’t ask you to. As I said before, these gasworks are not for sale. They suit me just as they are. They are not on the market; but you insist that I shall name a price and I name it—sixty thousand in cash. Take it or leave it.”
Having concluded this, for him, unusually long speech, Mr. Betts brought his fingertips together with great mathematical exactness, matching each finger and each thumb against its fellow as though they were all parts of a sum in addition that he was doing. With his fingers added up to his satisfaction and the total found correct, he again turned his gaze out of the smudgy window. This time it was something on the extreme top of the gas tank which seemed to engage his attention. Cassius Poindexter opened the street door and started in; but at the sight of so much company he checked himself on the threshold, combed back his side whiskers nervously, bowed dumbly and withdrew, closing the door softly behind him.
“If we could only reach some reasonable basis of figuring now,” said the major, addressing Mr. Betts’ left ear and the back of Mr. Betts’ head—“say, forty thousand, now?” Mr. Betts squinted his Stone Age eyes the better to see out of the dirty window.
“Or even forty-five?” supplemented Doctor Lake, unable to hold in any longer. “Why, damn it, sir, forty-five thousand is a fabulous price to pay for this junkpile.”
“Sixty thousand—in cash!” The ultimatum seemed to issue from the rear of Mr. Betts’ collar.
Major Covington glanced about him, taking toll of the expressions of his associates. On their faces sorrowful capitulation was replacing chagrin. He nodded toward them and together they nodded back sadly.
“How much did you say you wanted down?” gulped the major weakly.
“All down,” announced Mr. Betts in a tone of finality; “all in cash. Those are my terms.”
“But it isn’t regular!” babbled Colonel Cope.
“It isn’t regular for a man to sell something he doesn’t want to sell either,” gulped Mr. Betts. “I bought for cash and I sell for cash. I never do business any other way.”
“How much time will you give us?” asked the major. The surrender was complete and unconditional.
“Until this time tomorrow,” said Mr. Betts; “then the deal is off.” Doctor Lake slid off his stool, or else he fell off. At any rate, he descended from it hurriedly. His face was very red.
“Well, of all the—” he began; but the major and the colonel had him by the arms and were dragging him outside. When they were gone—all of them—Mr. Betts indulged himself in the luxury of a still, small smile—a smile that curled his lips back just a trifle and died of frostbite before it reached his fossilized eyes.
“Gentlemen,” Mr. Witherbee was saying in his room at the Richland House ten minutes later, “the man has you at his mercy and apparently he knows it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had not already been in communication with the Gatins crowd. His attitude is suspicious. As I view it, it is most certainly suspicious. Gentlemen, I would advise you to close with him. He is asking a figure far in excess of the real value of the works—but what can you do?”
“And will you take the gasworks at sixty thousand?” inquired Major Covington hopefully.
“Ah, gentlemen,” said Mr. Witherbee, and his smile was sympathetic and all-embracing, “that, I think, is asking too much; but, in view of the circumstances, I will do this—I will take them at”—he paused to consider—“I will take them, gentlemen, at fifty thousand. In time I think I can make them worth that much to me; but fifty thousand is as far as I can go—positively. You stand to lose ten thousand on your deal for the gasworks, but I presume you will make that back and more on your sale to me of the light and power plant. Can’t I offer you fresh cigars, gentlemen?”
If for any reason a run had started on any one of the three local banks the next day there would have been the devil and all to pay, because there was mighty little ready money in any one of them. Their vaults had been scraped clean of currency; and that currency, in a compact bundle, was rapidly traveling eastward in the company of a smallish iron-gray man answering to the name of Betts. At about the same moment Mr. Witherbee, with the assistance of the darky porter of the Richland House, was packing his wardrobe into an ornate traveling kit. As he packed he explained to Doctor Lake and Major Covington:
“I am called to Memphis twenty-four hours sooner than I had expected. Tomorrow we close a deal there involving, I should say, half a million dollars. Let us see—this is Wednesday—isn’t it? I will return here on Friday morning. Meanwhile you may have the papers drawn by your attorney and ready for submission to my lawyer, Mr. Sharkey, who should arrive tomorrow from Cincinnati. If he finds them all shipshape, as I have every reason to expect he will find them, then, on Friday morning, gentlemen, we will sign up and I will pay the binder, amounting to—how much?—ninety thousand, I believe, was the figure we agreed upon. Quite so. Gentlemen, you will find a box of my favorite cigars on that bureau yonder. Help yourselves.”
No lawyer named Sharkey arrived from Cincinnati on Thursday; no J. Hayden Witherbee returned from Memphis on Friday,—nor was there word from him by wire or mail. The papers, drawn in Colonel Cope’s best legal style, all fringed and trimmed with whereases and wherefores, waited—and waited. Telegrams which Major Covington sent to Memphis remained unanswered; in fact, undelivered. Major Covington suddenly developed a cold and sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach. In his associates he discerned signs of the same chilling manifestation. It seemed to occur to all of them at once that nobody had asked J. Hayden Witherbee for his credentials or had inquired into his antecedents. Glamoured by the grandeur of his person, they had gone along with him—had gone along until now blindly. Saturday, hour by hour, darkling suspicion grew in each mind and reared itself like a totem pole adorned with snake-headed, hawk-clawed figments of dread. And on Saturday, for the first time in a solid week the Daily Evening News carried no front-page account of the latest doings and sayings of J. Hayden Witherbee.
Upon a distracted conference, taking place Saturday night in the directors’ room of the bank, intruded the sad figure of Cassius Poindexter, combing back his side whiskers like a man eternally on the point of parting a pair of lace curtains and never coming through them.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I’ve got something to say that I think you gentlemen oughter hear. If you thought those two—Witherbones, or whatever his name is, and my late employer, Henry Betts—if you all thought those two were strangers to one another you were mistaken—that’s all. Two weeks ago I saw a letter on Betts’ desk signed by this man Witherbee—if that’s his name. And Tuesday when Betts told me he was goin’ to sell out, I remembered it.”
The major was the first to get his voice back; and it was shaky with rage and—other emotions.
“You—you saw us all there Tuesday morning,” he shouted, “didn’t you? And when Betts told you he was going to sell and you remembered about Witherbee why didn’t you have sense enough to put two and two together?”
“I did have sense enough to put two and two together,” answered Cassius Poindexter in hurt tones. “That’s exactly what I did.”
“Then why in the name of Heaven didn’t you come to us—to me—and tell us?” demanded the major.
“Well, sirs,” said the intruder, “I was figurin’ on doin’ that very thing, but it sort of slipped out of my mind. You see, I’ve been thinkin’ right stiddy lately about an invention that I’m workin’ on at odd times—I’m perfectin’ a non-refillble bottle,” he explained—“and somehow or other this here other matter plum’ escaped me.”
The door closed upon the inventor. Stunned into silence, they sat mute for a long, ghastly half minute. Doctor Lake was the first to speak:
“If could afford it,” he said softly—“if at present I could afford it I’d put a dynamite bomb under that gashouse and blow it up! And I’d do it anyhow,” he went on, warming to his theme, “if I was only right certain of blowing up that idiot and his non-refillable bottle along with it!”
Malley, of the Sun, was doing the hotel run this night. He came up to the room clerk’s wicket at the desk of the Royal.
“Say, Mac,” he hailed, “what’s the prospect? So far, all I’ve got is one rubber magnate from South America—a haughty hidalgo with an Irish name and a New England accent, who was willing to slip me a half-column interview providing I’d run in the name of his company eight or nine times—him, and an Oklahoma Congressman, with the makings of a bun, and one of Sandusky, Ohio’s well-known and popular merchant princes, with a line of talk touching on the business revival in the Middle West. If that’s not slim pickings I don’t want a cent! Say, help an honest working lad out—can’t you?”
This appeal moved the room clerk.
“Let’s see now,” he said, and ran a highly polished fingernail down a long column of names. Halfway down the finger halted.
“Here’s copy for you, maybe,” he said. “The name is Priest—William Pitman Priest is the way he wrote it. He got in here this morning, an old-time Southerner; and already he’s got every coon bellhop round the place fighting for a chance to wait on him. He’s the real thing all right, I guess—looks it and talks it too. You ought to be able to have some fun with him.”
“Where’s he registered from?” asked Malley hopefully.
“From Kentucky—that’s all; just Kentucky, with no town given,” said Mac, grinning.
“There’re still a few of those old Southerners left that’ll register from a whole state at large. Why, there he goes now!” said the room clerk, and he pointed.
Across the lobby, making slow headway against weaving tides of darting, hurrying figures, was moving a stoutish and elderly form clad in a fashion that made it look doubly and trebly strange among those marble and onyx precincts. A soft black hat of undoubted age and much shapelessness was jammed down upon the head, and from beneath its wide brim at the rear escaped wisps of thin white hair that curled over the upturned coat collar. The face the hat shaded was round and pink, chubby almost, and ended in a white chin beard which, as Malley subsequently said in his story, flowed down its owner’s chest like a point-lace jabot. There was an ancient caped overcoat of a pattern that had been fashionable perhaps twenty years ago and would be fashionable again, no doubt, twenty years hence; there were gray trousers that had never been pressed apparently; and, to finish off with, there was a pair of box-toed, high-heeled boots of a kind now seen mostly in faded full-length photographs of gentlemen taken in the late seventies—boots with wrinkled tops that showed for four inches or more and shined clear up to the trouser-line with some sort of blacking that put a dull bluish iridescent blush upon the leather, almost like the colors on a dove’s breast feathers.
“Thanks for the tip, Mac,” said Malley, and he made off after the old man, who by now had turned and was maneuvering down the corridor toward where a revolving door turned unceasingly, like a wheel in a squirrel’s cage. “Oh, colonel!” called out Malley on a venture, jibing through the human currents and trying to overtake the stout, broad figure ahead of him. An exceedingly young, exceedingly important person, who looked as though he might be prominent in the national guard or on some governor’s staff, half rose from a leather lounge and glanced about inquiringly, but the old man in the cape and boots kept on.
“Major!” tried Malley vainly. “Major! Just a minute, please.” And then, “Judge! Oh, judge!” he called as a last resort, and at that his quarry swung about on his heels and stopped, eying him with whimsical, mild blue eyes under wrinkly lids.
“Son,” he said in a high, whiny voice which instantly appealed to Malley’s sense of the picturesque, “was it me that you’ve been yellin’ at?”
Malley answered, telling his name and his business. A moment later he was surprised to find himself shaking hands warmly with the older man.
“Malley, did you say?” the judge was inquiring almost eagerly. “Well, now, son, I’m glad to meet up with you. Malley is a fairly familiar name and a highly honored one down in our part of the country. There was a captain in Forrest’s command of your name—Captain Malley—a mighty gallant soldier and a splendid gentleman! You put me right sharply in mind of him too—seem to favor him considerable round the eyes. Are you closely related to the Southern branch of the family, suh?”
Malley caught himself wishing that he could say Yes. The old judge showed almost a personal disappointment when Malley confessed that none of his kinspeople, so far as he knew, ever resided south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“No doubt a distant connection,” amended the judge, as though consoling both himself and Malley; “the family resemblance is there shorely.” He laid a pudgy pink hand on Malley’s arm. “You’ll pardon me for presumin’ on such short acquaintance, but down where I come from it is customary, when two gentlemen meet up together at about this hour of the evenin’”—it was then three o’clock p.m., Eastern time, as Malley noted—“it is customary for them to take a dram. Will you join me?”
Scenting his story, Malley fell into step by the old judge’s side; but at the door of the café the judge halted him.
“Son,” he said confidentially, “I like this tavern mightily—all but the grocery here. I must admit that I don’t much care for the bottled goods they’re carryin’ in stock. I sampled ‘em and I didn’t enthuse over ‘em. They are doubtless excellent for cookin’ purposes, but as beverages they sort of fall short.
“I wish you’d go up to my chamber with me and give me the benefit of your best judgment on a small vial of liquor I brought with me in my valise. It’s an eighteen-year-old sour mash, mellowed in the wood, and I feel that I can recommend it to your no doubt dis-criminatin’ palate. Will you give me the pleasure of your company, suh?”
As Malley, smiling to himself, went with the judge, it struck him with emphasis that, for a newly arrived transient, this old man seemed to have an astonishingly wide acquaintance among the house staff of the Hotel Royal. A page-boy, all buttons and self-importance, sidestepped them, smiling and ducking at the old judge’s nod; and the elevator attendant, a little, middle-aged Irishman, showed unalloyed pleasure when the judge, after blinking slightly and catching his breath as the car started upward with a dart like a scared swallow, inquired whether he’d had any more news yet of the little girl who was in the hospital. Plainly the old judge and the elevator man had already been exchanging domestic confidences.
Into his small room on the seventeenth floor Judge Priest ushered the reporter with the air of one dispensing the hospitalities of a private establishment to an honored guest, made him rest his hat and overcoat—“rest” was the word the judge used—and sit down in the easiest chair and make himself comfortable.
In response to a conversation which the judge had over the telephone with some young person of the feminine gender, whom he insisted on addressing as Miss Exchange, there presently came knocking at the door a grinning negro boy bearing the cracked ice, the lump sugar and the glasses the old judge had ordered. Him the judge addressed direct.
“Look here,” asked the judge, looking up from where he was rummaging out a flat quart flask from the depths of an ancient and much-seamed valise, “ain’t you the same boy that I was talkin’ to this momin’?”
“Yas, suh,” said the boy, snickering, “Horace.”
“Where you came from they didn’t call you Horace, did they?” inquired the old man.
“Naw, suh, that they didn’t,” admitted Horace, showing all his teeth except the extremely rearmost ones.
“What was it they called you—Smoke or Rabbit?”
“Ginger,” owned up Horace delightedly, and vanished, still snickering. Malley noticed that the coin which the old man had extracted from the depths of a deep pocket and tossed to the darky was a much smaller coin than guests in a big New York hotel customarily bestowed upon bellboys for such services as this; yet Horace had accepted it with every outward evidence of a deep and abiding satisfaction.
With infinite pains and a manner almost reverential, as though he were handling sacred vessels, the old judge compiled two dark reddish portions which he denominated toddies. Malley, sipping his, found it to be a most smooth and tasty mixture. And as he sipped, the old judge, smiling blandly, bestowed himself in a chair, which he widely overflowed, and balancing his own drink on the chair arm he crossed his booted feet and was ready, he said, to hear what his young friend might have to say.
As it turned out, Malley didn’t have much to say, except to put the questions by which a skilled reporter leads on the man he wants to talk. And the old judge was willing enough to talk. It was his first visit to New York; he had come reluctantly, at the behest of certain friends, upon business of a more or less private nature; he had taken a walk and a ride already; he had seen a stretch of Broadway and some of Fifth Avenue, and he was full of impressions and observations that tickled Malley dear down to the core of his reportorial soul.
So Malley, like the wise newspaper man he was, threw away his notes on the Brazilian rubber magnate and the merchant prince of Sandusky; and at dark he went back to the office and wrote the story of old Judge Priest, of Kentucky, for a full column and a quarter. Boss Clark, the night city editor, saw the humor value of the story before he had run through the first paragraph; and he played it up hard on the second page of the Sun, with a regular Sun head over it.
It was by way of being a dull time of news in New York. None of the wealthiest families was marrying or giving in marriage; more remarkable still, none of them was divorcing or giving in divorce. No subway scandal was emerging drippingly from the bowels of the earth; no aviator was descending abruptly from aloft with a dull and lethal thud. Malley’s story, with the personality of the old judge deftly set forward as a foil for his homely simplicity and small-town philosophy, arched across the purview of divers saddened city editors like a rainbow spanning a leadish sky. The craft, in the vernacular of the craft, saw the story and went to it. Inside of twenty-four hours Judge Priest, of Kentucky, was Broadway’s reigning favorite, for publicity purposes anyhow. The free advertising he got could not have been measured in dollars and cents if a prima donna had been getting it.
The judge kept open house all that next day in his room at the Hotel Royal, receiving regular and special members of various city staffs. Margaret Movine, the star lady writer of the Evening Journal, had a full-page interview, in which the judge, using the Southern accent as it is spoken in New York exclusively, was made to discuss, among other things, the suffragette movement, women smoking in public, Fifth Avenue, hobble skirts, Morgan’s raid, and the iniquity of putting sugar in corn bread. The dialect was the talented Miss Margaret Movine’s, but the thoughts and the words were the judge’s, faithfully set forth. The Times gave him a set of jingles on its editorial page and the Evening Mail followed up with a couple of humorous paragraphs; but it was the Sunday World that scored heaviest.
McCartwell, of the Sunday, went up and secured from the judge his own private recipe for mint juleps—a recipe which the judge said had been in his family for three generations—and he thought possibly longer, it having been brought over the mountains and through the Gap from Virginia by a grandsire who didn’t bring much of anything else of great value; and the World, printing this recipe and using it as a starter, conducted through its correspondents southward a telegraphic symposium of mint-julep recipes. Private John Allen, of Mississippi; Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas; Marse Henry Watterson and General Simon Bolivar Buckner, of Kentucky; Senator Bob Taylor, of Tennessee, and others, contributed. A dispute at once arose in the South concerning the relative merits oi mint bruised and mint crushed. An old gentleman in Virginia wrote an indignant letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch—he said it should be bruised only—and a personal misunderstanding between two veteran members oi the Pendennis Club, of Louisville, was with difficulty averted by bystanders. For the American, Tom Powers drew a cartoon showing the old judge, with a julep in his hand, marching through the Prohibition belt of the South, accompanied by a procession of jubilant Joys, while hordes of disconcerted Glooms fled ahead oi them across the map.
In short, for the better part of a week Judge Priest was a celebrity, holding the limelight to the virtual exclusion of grand opera stars, favorite sons, white hopes, debutantes and contributing editors of the Outlook Magazine. And on the fourth day the judge, sitting in the privacy of his chamber and contemplating his sudden prominence, had an idea—and this idea was the answer to a question he had been asking himself many times since he left home. He spent half an hour and seventy cents telephoning to various newspaper offices. When finally he hung up the receiver and wriggled into his caped overcoat a benevolent smile illumined his broad, pink face. The smile still lingered there as he climbed into a cab at the curb and gave the driver a certain Wall Street address, which was the address ci one J. Hayden Witherbee.
J. Hayden Witherbee, composing the firm of Witherbee & Company, bankers, had a cozy flytrap or office suite in one of the tallest and most ornate of the office buildings or spider-webs in the downtown financial district. This location was but a natural one, seeing that Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee’s interests were widely scattered and diversified, including as they did the formation and construction—on paper and with paper—of trolley lines; the floating of various enterprises, which floated the more easily by reason of the fact that water was their native element; and the sale of what are known in the West as holes in the ground and in the East as permanent mining investments. He rode to and from business in a splendid touring car trained to stop automatically at at least three cafés on the way up town of an evening; and he had in his employ a competent staff, including a grayish gentle-man of a grim and stolid aspect, named Betts.
Being a man of affairs, and many of them, Mr. Witherbee had but small time for general newspaper reading, save and except only the market quotations, the baseball scores in season and the notices of new shows for tired business men, though keeping a weather eye ever out for stories touching on the pernicious activities of the Federal Grand Jury, with its indictments and summonses and warrants, and of the United States Post-Office Department, with its nasty habit of issuing fraud orders and tying up valuable personal mail. Nevertheless, on a certain wintry afternoon about two o’clock or half-past two, when his office boy brought to him a small card, engraved—no, not engraved; printed—smudgily printed with the name of William Pitman Priest and the general address of Kentucky, the sight of the card seemed to awaken within him certain amusing stories which had lately fallen under his attention in the printed columns; and, since he never overlooked any bets—even the small ones—he told the boy to show the gentleman in.
The reader, I take it, being already acquainted with the widely varying conversational characteristics of Judge Priest and Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, it would be but a waste of space and time for me to undertake to describe in detail the manner of their meeting on this occasion. Suffice it to say that the judge was shown into Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee’s private office; that he introduced himself, shook hands with Mr. Witherbee, and in response to an invitation took a seat; after which he complimented Mr. Witherbee upon the luxury and good taste of his surroundings, and remarked that it was seasonable weather, considering the Northern climate and the time of the year. And then, being requested to state the nature of his business, he told Mr. Witherbee he had called in the hope of interesting him in an industrial property located in the South. It was at this juncture that Mr. Witherbee pressed a large, dark cigar upon his visitor.
“Yes,” said Mr. Witherbee, “we have been operating somewhat extensively in the South of late, and we are always on the lookout for desirable properties of almost any character. Er—where is this particular property you speak of located and what is its nature?”
When Judge Priest named the town Mr. Witherbee gave a perceptible start, and when Judge Priest followed up this disclosure by stating that the property in question was a gasworks plant which he, holding power of attorney and full authority to act, desired to sell to Mr. Witherbee, complete with equipment, accounts, franchise and good will, Mr. Witherbee showed a degree of heat and excitement entirely out of keeping with the calmness and deliberation of Judge Priest’s remarks. He asked Judge Priest what he—the judge—took him—Witherbee—for anyhow? Judge Priest, still speaking slowly and choosing his words with care, then told him—and that only seemed to add to Mr. Witherbee’s state of warmth. However, Judge Priest drawled right on.
“Yes, suh,” he continued placidly, “accordin’ to the best of my knowledge and belief, you are in the business of buyin’ and sellin’ such things as gasworks, and so I’ve come to you to sell you this here one. You have personal knowledge of the plant, I believe, havin’ been on the ground recently.”
“Say,” demanded Mr. Witherbee with a forced grin—a grin that would have reminded you of a man drawing a knife—“say, what do you think you’re trying to slip over on me? I did go to your measly little one-horse town and I spent more than a week there; and I did look over your broken-down little old gashouse, and I concluded that I didn’t want it; and then I came away. That’s the kind of a man I am—when I’m through with a thing I’m through with it! Huh! What would I do with those gasworks if I bought ‘em?”
“That, suh, is a most pertinent point,” said Judge Priest, “and I’m glad you brought it up early. In case, after buyin’ this property, you do not seem to care greatly for it, I am empowered to buy it back from you at a suitable figure. For example, I am willin’ to sell it to you for sixty thousand dollars; and then, providin’ you should want to sell it back to me, I stand prepared to take it off your hands at twenty-six thousand five hundred. I name those figures, suh, because those are the figures that were lately employed in connection with the proposition.”
“Blackmail—huh!” sneered Mr. Witherbee. “Cheap blackmail and nothing else. Well, I took you for a doddering old pappy guy; but you’re a bigger rube even than I thought. Now you get out of here before you get thrown out—see?”
“Now there you go, son—fixin’ to lose your temper already,” counseled the old judge reprovingly.
But Mr. Witherbee had already lost it—completely lost it. He jumped up from his desk as though contemplating acts of violence upon the limbs and body of the broad, stoutish old man sitting in front of him; but he sheered off. Though old Judge Priest’s lips kept right on smiling, his eyelids puckered down into a disconcerting little squint; and between them little menacing blue gleams flickered. Anyway, personal brawls, even in the sanctity of one’s office, were very bad form and sometimes led to that publicity which is so distasteful to one engaged in large private enterprises. Mr. Witherbee had known the truth of this when his name had been Watkins and when it had been the Bland. Brothers’ Investment Company, limited; and he knew it now when he was Witherbee & Company. So, as aforesaid, he sheered off. Retreating to his desk, he felt for a button. A buzzer whirred dimly in the wall like a rattlesnake’s tail. An officeboy poked his head in instantly.
“Herman,” ordered Mr. Witherbee, trembling with his passion, “you go down to the superintendent’s office and tell him to send a special building officer here to me right away!”
The boy’s head vanished, and Mr. Witherbee swung back again on the judge, wagging a threatening forefinger at him.
“Do you know what I’m going to do?” he asked. “Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do—I’m going to have you chucked out of here bodily—that’s what!”
But he couldn’t keep the quaver out of the threat. Somehow he was developing a growing fear of this imperturbable old man.
“Now, son,” said Judge Priest, who hadn’t moved, “I wouldn’t do that if I was you. It might not be so healthy for you.”
“Oh, you needn’t be trying any of your cheap Southern gunplays round here,” warned Mr. Witherbee; but, in spite of his best efforts at control, his voice rose quivering at the suggestion.
“Bless your heart, son!” said the judge soothingly, “I wouldn’t think of usin’ a gun on you any more’n I’d think of takin’ a Winchester rifle to kill one of these here cockroaches! Son,” he said, rising now for the first time, “you come along here with me a minute—I want to show you something you ain’t seen yet.”
He walked to the door and opened it part way. Witherbee, wondering and apprehensive, followed him and looked over the old judge’s shoulder into the anteroom.
For J. Hayden Witherbee, one quick glance was enough. Four—no, five—five alert-looking young men, all plainly marked with the signs of a craft abhorrent to Mr. Witherbee, sat in a row of chairs beyond a railing; and beyond them was a sixth person, a young woman with a tiptilted nose and a pair of inquisitive, expectant gray eyes. Mr. Witherbee would have known them anywhere by their backs—jackals of the press, muckrakers, sworn enemies to Mr. Witherbee and all his kith and kind!
It was Mr. Witherbee who slammed the door shut, drawing Judge Priest back into the shelter of the closed room; and it was Mr. Witherbee who made inquiry, tremulously, almost humbly:
“What does this mean? What are these people doing there? What game is this?” He sputtered out the words, one question overlapping the next.
“Son,” said Judge Priest, “you seem flustered. Ca’m yourself. This is no game as I know of. These are merely friends of mine—representatives of the daily press of your city.”
“But how did they come to be here?”
“Oh!” said the judge. “Why, I tele-phoned ‘em. I telephoned ‘em that I was comin’ down here on a matter of business, and that maybe there might be a sort of an item for them if they’d come too. I’ve been makin’ what they call copy for them, and we’re all mighty sociable and friendly; and so they came right along. To tell you the truth, we all arrived practically together. You see, if I was sort of shoved out of here against my will and maybe mussed up a little those boys and that there young lady there—her name Is Miss Margaret Movine—they’d be sure to put pieces in their papers about it; and if it should come out incidentally that the cause of the row was a certain gasworks transaction, in a certain town down in Kentucky, they’d probably print that too. Why, those young fellows would print anything almost if I wanted them to. You’d be surprised!
“Yes, suh, you’d be surprised to see how much they’d print for me,” he went on, tapping J. Hayden Witherbee upon his agitated chest with a blunt forefinger. “I’ll bet you they’d go into the full details.”
As Mr. Witherbee listened, Mr. Witherbee perspired freely. At this very moment there were certain transactions pending throughout the country—he had a telegram in his desk now from Betts, sent from a small town in Alabama—and newspaper publicity of an unpleasant and intimate nature might be fatal in the extreme. Mr. Witherbee had a mind trained to act quickly.
“Wait a minute!” he said, mopping his brow and wetting his lips, they being the only dry things about him. “Wait a minute, please. If we could settle this—this matter—just between ourselves, quietly—and peaceably—-there wouldn’t be anything to print—would there?”
“As I understand the ethics of your Eastern journalism, there wouldn’t be anything to print,” said Judge Priest. “The price of them gasworks, accordin’ to the latest quotations, was sixty thousand—but liable to advance without notice.”
“And what—what did you say you’d buy ‘em back at?”
“Twenty-six thousand five hundred was the last price,” said the judge, “but subject to further shrinkage almost any minute.”
“I’ll trade,” said Mr. Witherbee.
“Much obliged to you, son,” said Judge Priest gratefully, and he began fumbling in his breast pocket. “I’ve got the papers all made out.”
Mr. Witherbee regained his desk and reached for a checkbook just as the officeboy poked his head in again.
“Special officer’s cornin’ right away, sir,” he said.
“Tell him to go away and keep away,” snarled the flurried Mr. Witherbee; “and you keep that door shut—tight! Shall I make the check out to you?” he asked the judge.
“Well, now, I wouldn’t care to bother with checks,” said the judge. “All the recent transactions involvin’ this here gashouse property was by the medium of the common currency of the country, and I wouldn’t care to undertake on my own responsibility to interfere with a system that has worked heretofore with such satisfaction. I’ll take the difference in cash—if you don’t mind.”
“But I can’t raise that much cash now,” whined Witherbee. “I haven’t that much in my safe. I doubt if I could get it at my bank on such short notice.”
“I know of a larger sum bein’ gathered together in a much smaller community than this—oncet!” said the judge reminiscently. “I would suggest that you try.”
“I’ll try,” said Mr. Witherbee desperately. “I’ll send out for it—on second thought, I guess I can raise it.”
“I’ll wait,” said the judge; and he took his seat again, but immediately got up and started for the door. “I’ll ask the boys and Miss Margaret Movine to wait too,” he explained. “You see, I’m leavin’ for my home tomorrow and we’re all goin’ to have a little farewell blowout together tonight.”
Upon Malley, who in confidence had heard enough from the judge to put two and two together and guess something of the rest, there was beginning to dawn a conviction that behind Judge William Pitman Priest’s dovelike simplicity there lurked some part of the wisdom that has been commonly attributed to the serpent of old. His reporter’s instinct sensed out a good story in it, too, but his pleadings with the old judge to stay over for one more day, anyhow, were not altogether based on a professional foundation. They were in large part personal.
Judge Priest, caressing a certificate of deposit in a New York bank doing a large Southern business, insisted that he had to go. So Malley went with him to the ferry and together they stood on the deck of the ferryboat, saying good-by. For the twentieth time Malley was promising the old man that in the spring he would surely come to Kentucky and visit him. And at the time he meant it.
In front of them as they faced the shore loomed up the tall buildings, rising jaggedly like long dog teeth in Manhattan’s lower jaw. There were pennons of white steam curling from their eaves. The Judge’s puckered eyes took in the picture, from the crowded streets below to the wintry blue sky above, where mackerel-shaped white clouds drifted by, all aiming the same way, like a school of silver fish.
“Son,” he was saying, “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything more than this here little visit, and I’m beholden to you boys for a lot. It’s been pleasant and it’s been profitable, and I’m proud that I met up with all of you.”
“When will you be coming back, judge?” asked Malley.
“Well, that I don’t know,” admitted the old judge. “You see, son, I’m gettin’ on in years, considerably; and it’s sort of a hard trip from away down where I live plum’ up here to New York. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “this was the third time in my life that I started for this section of the country. The first time I started was with General Albert Sidney Johnston and a lot of others; but, owin’ to meetin’ up with your General Grant at a place called Pittsburg Landing by your people and Shiloh by ours, we sort of altered our plans. Later on I started again, bein’ then temporarily in the company of General John Morgan, of my own state; and that time we got as far as the southern part of the state of Ohio before we run into certain insurmountable obstacles; but this time I managed to git through. I was forty-odd years doin’ it—but I done it! And, son,” he called out as the ferryboat began to quiver and Malley stepped ashore, “I don’t mind tellin’ you in strict confidence that while the third Confederate invasion of the North was a long time gittin’ under way, it proved a most complete success in every particular when it did. Give my best reguards to Miss Margaret Movine.”