It was nearly midnight before he restored each group of clippings to its proper envelope and took the envelopes to a grated window behind the library and handed them in to a youth on duty there. First, though, he took time, sitting there in the empty art room, to write a short, joyous letter to a certain person in San Jose, California, telling her the big chance had [321] come to him very much sooner than he had expected, and that if he made good on it—as he had every intention of doing—they might not, after all, have to wait so very long for that marriage license and that wedding and that little flat here in little old New York. Then he went uptown to the Godey Arms Hotel, where his dreams that night were such dreams as an ambitious young man very much in love with two sweethearts—one a profession and the other a girl—might be expected to dream under such circumstances.
Next morning, at the Wampum Club, he saw Bogardus, a grey-haired, rotund man, and Pratt, an elderly gentleman, with a smile as oily as a fish duck’s apprehending minnows, and a manner as gentle as a fox’s stalking a hen-roost. From these two he extracted all that he had expected to get and more besides. Indeed, he had but to hold out his hands and together they shook fruity facts and fruitier figures down upon him in a shower. Until nearly two o’clock they kept him with them. He had just time to snatch a hurried bite at a dairy lunch, board a subway express at the Grand Central, and be at the offices of Myrowitz, Godfrey, Godfrey & Murtha at three o’clock. A sign painter was altering the firm’s name on the outer door of the firm’s reception room, his aim plainly being to shorten it by the elimination of the Murtha part of it. On beyond the door the gentleman who thus was [322] being eliminated received Singlebury in a private room and gave him nearly two hours of his valuable time.
From what Mr. Foxman had said Singlebury rather expected Mr. Murtha, at the outset, might be reluctant to furnish the coupling links between the legal chicanery and the financial skullduggery which would make this projected merger a conspicuous scandal in a district of conspicuous industrial scandals; had rather expected Mr. Murtha’s mind might require crafty sounding and skillful pumping. Here Singlebury was agreeably surprised, for, it being first understood that Mr. Murtha’s name was nowhere to appear in what Singlebury might write, Mr. Murtha proved to be as frank as frank could be. Indeed, when it came to a disclosure of the rôles played by two of his associates, from whom now he was parting, Mr. Murtha, the retiring member of this well-known house of corporation law, betrayed an almost brutal frankness. They, doubtlessly, would have called it rank professional treachery—base, personal ingratitude and a violation of all the ethics of their highly ethical calling.
Mr. Murtha, looking at things through very different glasses, put it on the high ground of his duty, as a citizen and a taxpayer, to the general health and the general morality of the general public. It is this same difference of opinion which makes neighbourhood quarrels, [323] lawsuits and wars between nations popular in the most civilised climes.
In all essential details, the tale, when Murtha was through with Singlebury and Singlebury was through with Murtha, stood completed and connected, jointed and doubt-proof. That second evening Singlebury spent in his room, arranging his data in their proper sequence and mapping out in his head his introduction. Next day, all day, he wrote his story. Just before dusk he drew the last page out of his typewriter and corrected it. The job was done and it was a good job. It ran four columns and over. It stripped that traffic grab to its bare and grinning bones. It was loaded with bombshells for the proposed merger and with the shrapnel of certain criminal prosecution for the men behind that merger, and most of all for John W. Blake, the man behind those other and lesser men.
To Singlebury, though, it was even more than this. To him it was a good story, well written, well balanced, happily adjusted, smartly phrased; and on top of this, it was the most precious jewel of a reporter’s treasure casket. It was a cracking, smashing, earth-shaking, exclusive—scoop, as they would have called it out yonder on the Coast where he came from—beat, as they would call it here in New York.
Personally, as per instructions, he put the finished manuscript into the hands of Mr. Foxman, in Mr. Foxman’s office, then stood by [324] while Mr. Foxman ran through the opening paragraphs.
“Singlebury,” said Mr. Foxman, laying the sheets down, “this looks to me like a good piece of work. I like your beginning, anyhow. The first ten lines ought to blow that bunch of pirates clean out of water.” He glanced keenly at the drooping figure of the other. “Kind of played out, aren’t you?”
“A little,” confessed the reporter. “Now that it’s over, I do feel a bit let down.”
“I’ll bet you do,” said Mr. Foxman. “Well, you’d better run along to your hotel and get a good night’s rest. Take to-morrow off too—don’t report here until day after to-morrow; that’ll be Friday, won’t it? All right then, I’ll see you Friday afternoon here; I may have something of interest to say to you then. Meanwhile, as I told you before, keep your mouth shut to everybody. I don’t know yet whether I’ll want to run your story to-morrow morning or the morning after. My information is that Blake, through his lawyers, will announce the completion of the merger, probably on Friday, or possibly on Saturday. I may decide to hold off the explosion until they come out with their announcement. Really, that would be the suitable moment to open fire on ’em and smash up their little stock-market game for them.”