The Mystery of the Locks

by E. W. Howe

The people did little else than wonder at this, and curse Capital because it did not locate in a town where nature was lavish in the matter of location, instead of going to a place where it would always find the necessity of contending against odds confronting it. Such a town was Ben's City, in the estimation of those living at Davy's Bend; but they must have been mistaken, for great houses and institutions grew up where little had been planted, and men with money trampled upon each other in their mad haste to take advantage of the prosperity that seemed to be in the air. Those who drew the maps declared that a crash was soon to come, when the capitalists who did not know their own interests would trample upon each other in their haste to get away; but those who bought Ben's City property, no difference at what price, soon sold out again at an advance; and the prosperity of the place was quite phenomenal.

Never was Capital so thoroughly hated as in Davy's Bend. It was cursed a thousand times a day, and shown to be fickle and foolish and ungrateful; for evidences of these weaknesses on the part of Capital abounded on every hand. There were railroads to be built out of Davy's Bend that would pay immensely, as had been demonstrated times without number by the local paper; but Capital stubbornly refused to build them, preferring to earn a beggarly per cent elsewhere. There were manufactories to be built in Davy's Bend that would make their owners rich, as every child knew; but Capital, after a full investigation, was so dull that it could not see the opportunity. The town was alive with opportunities for profitable investments, but Capital, with a mean and dogged indifference, refused to come to Davy's Bend; therefore Capital was hated, and bullied, and cursed, and denounced; and it was generally agreed that it deserved no better fate than to go to ruin in the general crash that would finally overtake Ben's City.

The people of Davy's Bend were a good deal like a grumbling and idle man, who spends the time which should be devoted to improving his condition to grumbling about his own ill luck and the good luck of his industrious rival, who is steadily prospering; and as men frequently believe that the fates are against them when they are themselves their only opposition, so it was generally believed in this wretched little town that some sort of a powerful and alert goddess was in league with Ben's City. While they readily admitted their own points of advantage, even to the extent of giving themselves more credit than they deserved, they refused to be equally fair with their competitor, as men do, and contended, with an ignorant persistency, that Ben's City was prosperous because of "luck," whereas they should have known that there is no such thing, either good or bad.

But, in course of time, when they found that they would always be in the rear, no difference whether they liked it or not, the people of the Bend, in order to more thoroughly denounce their own town for its lack of ability to attract Capital, began to exaggerate the importance of Ben's City. A four-story building there became seven stories high, and those who visited the place vied with each other in giving vivid and untruthful accounts of its growth and prosperity on their return; all of which their acquaintances repeated over and over, though they knew it to be untrue, even adding to the exaggerated statements, in order to bully their own meek town.

Probably they were not proud of the greatness of their rival; for they talked of it as a cowardly man might exaggerate the strength of the fellow who had whipped him, using it as an excuse for defeat. Indeed, they were proud of nothing, except their own accounts of the greatness of Davy's Bend a long while before, when the huge warehouses were occupied, and before Capital had combined against it; of this they talked in a boastful way, magnifying everything so much that many of the listeners who had not heard the beginning of the conversation imagined that they were talking of Ben's City; but of bettering their present condition they had no thought,—by common consent it was so very bad that attempts to become prosperous again were useless, so the Bend was a little worse off every year, like an old and unsuccessful man.

Most of the business men of Davy's Bend had been clerks in the days of the town's prosperity, making their own terms when their energetic employers wanted to get away, and in spite of the general dullness and lack of success, they entertained very good opinions of themselves; for no difference what a citizen's misfortunes were, he loaded them all on the town, and thus apologized for his own lack of ability. But for the circumstance that he was tied to Davy's Bend, he would have been great and distinguished; they all said the same thing, and in order to get his own story believed, every man found it necessary to accept the explanations of the others, or pretend to; so it happened that the people did not hold themselves responsible for anything,—the town in which they lived was to blame for everything that was disagreeable, and was denounced accordingly.

The esteem with which the people regarded themselves was largely due to the manner in which they were referred to in the local paper, a ribald folio appearing once a week. None of the business men were advertisers, but they all gave the publisher free pardon if he referred to them in complimentary terms in his reading columns, and sent in his bill. Thus, the merchant who did not own the few goods he displayed was often referred to as a merchant prince, with an exceedingly shrewd business head on his shoulders. Sometimes notices of this character were left standing from week to week by the shiftless editor; a great number of them would occasionally get together on the same page, referring to different men as the shrewdest, the wisest, the most energetic, etc.; and it was very ridiculous, except to the persons concerned, who believed that the people read the notices with great pleasure.

So great was the passion for puffery among them that designing men who heard of it came along quite frequently, and wrote the people up in special publications devoted to that kind of literature. There would be a pretence that the special edition was to be devoted to the town, but it really consisted of a few lines at the beginning, stating that Davy's Bend had more natural advantages than any other town in the world, and four pages of puffs of the people, at so much per line; whereupon the men made fun of all the notices except their own, believing that its statements were true, and generally accepted as a part of the town's history. A few of those who were able had engravings inserted, and the puff writers, in order to make the notices and bills as large as possible, told how long and how often the subjects had been married; how many children they had, together with their names, where they came from, and much other mild information of this character.

It was known that many of the complimentary sketches were written by the persons to whom they referred; but while Harrisonfield, the grocer, gave wide circulation to the fact that Porterfield, of the dry-goods store, had referred to himself as an intellectual giant, and a business man of such sterling ability that he had received flattering offers to remove to Ben's City, he did not know that Porterfield was proving the same indiscretion with reference to himself.

Every new man who wrote up the town in this manner was more profuse with compliments of the people than his predecessor had been; and finally the common language was inadequate to describe their greatness, and they longed for somebody to come along who could "write," and who could fully explain how much each one was doing for the town; but although they all professed to be doing a great deal constantly for Davy's Bend, there was no reason to believe that any of them were accomplishing anything in this direction, for it could not have been duller than it was in the year of our Lord just referred to.