“See here, Watson,” said I, “you may help if you wish. But if you print a word without my consent, I can and will scoop the Times every day, from this on, with every item of business news coming through our office. Do you understand, and do you promise?”
“Why, certainly,” said he. “You’ve got the thing in your own hands. What is it, anyhow?”
I told him, and found that Trescott’s dipsomania was as well known to him as myself.
“He’s been throwing money to the fowls for a year or two,” he remarked. “It’s better than two to one you don’t find him at the Club: the atmosphere won’t be congenial for him there.”
At the Club we found Watson’s forecast verified. At O’Brien’s our knocking on the door aroused a sleepy bartender, who told us that no one was there, but refused to let us in. Watson called him aside, and they talked together for a few minutes.
“All right,” said the reporter, turning away from him, “much obliged, Hank; I believe you’ve struck it.”
Watson was leader now, and I followed him toward Front Street, near the river. He said that Hank, the barkeeper, had told him that Trescott had been in his saloon about nine o’clock, drinking heavily; and from the company he was in, it was to be suspected that he would be steered into a joint down on the river front. We passed through an alley, and down a back basement stairway, came to a door, on which Watson confidently knocked, and which was opened by a negro who let us in as soon as he saw the reporter. The air was sickening with an odor which I then perceived for the first time, and which Watson called the dope smell. There was an indefinable horror about the place, which so repelled me that nothing but my obligation could have held me there. The lights were dim, and at first I could see nothing more than that the sides of the room were divided into compartments by dull-colored draperies, in a manner suggesting the sections of a sleeping-car. There were sounds of dreadful breathings and inarticulate voices, and over all that sickening smell. I saw, flung aimlessly from the crepuscular and curtained recesses, here the hairy brawn of a man’s arm, there a woman’s leg in scarlet silk stocking, the foot half withdrawn from a red slipper with a high French heel. The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows had opened for me, and I stood as if gazing, with eyes freshly unsealed to its horrors, into some dim inferno, sibilant with hisses, and enwrapped in indeterminate dragon-folds—and I in quest of a lost soul.
“He wouldn’t go with his pal, boss,” I heard the negro say. “Ah tried to send him home, but he said he had some medicine to take, an’ he ‘nsisted on stayin’.”
As he ceased to speak, I knew that Watson had been interrogating him, and that he was referring to the man we sought.
“Show me where he is,” I commanded.