“I’m—I’m certainly obliged to you, Mr. Foxman,” stuttered Hemburg. “I guess maybe I was getting logy. A fellow certainly does get in a groove out there on that copy desk,” he added with the instinct of the inebriate to put the blame for his shortcomings on anything rather than on the real cause of those shortcomings.
“Perhaps so,” said Mr. Foxman; “let’s see if making a change won’t work a cure. Do you see this?” and he put his hand on the sheaf of Singlebury’s copy lying on his desk, under the captions he himself had done. “Well, this may turn out to be the biggest beat and the most important story that we’ve put over in a year. It’s all ready to go to the type-setting machines—I just finished reading copy on it myself. But if it leaks out—if a single word about this story gets out of this building before we’re ready to turn it loose on the street—the man responsible for that leak is going to lose his job no matter who or what he is. Understand?
“Now, then, excepting you and me and the man who wrote it, nobody employed inside this building knows there is such a story. I want you to take it upstairs with you now. Don’t [337] let ’em cut it up into regular takes for the machines. Tell the composing-room foreman—it’ll be Riordan, I guess—that he’s to take his two best machine operators off of whatever they’re doing and put ’em to work setting this story up, and nothing else. Those two men are to keep right at it until it’s done. I want a good, safe-mouthed man to set the head. I want the fastest proofreader up there, whoever that may be, to read the galley proofs, holding copy on it himself. Impress it on Riordan to tell the proofreader, the head setter and the two machine men that they are not to gab to anyone about what they’re doing. When the story is corrected I want you to put it inside a chase with a hold-for-release line on it, and cover it up with print paper, sealed and pasted on, and roll it aside. We’ve already got one hold-for-release yarn in type upstairs; it’s a Washington dispatch dealing with the Mexican situation. Better put the two stories close together somewhere out of the way. Riordan will know where to hide them. Then you bring a set of clean proofs of this story down here to me—to-night. I’ll wait right here for you.
“I’d like to run the thing to-morrow morning, leading with two columns on the front page and a two-column turnover on page two. But I can’t. There’s just one point to be cleared up before it’ll be safe to print it. I expect to clear up that point myself to-morrow. Then if everything is all right I’ll let you know and [338] we’ll probably go to the bat with the story Friday morning; that’ll be day after to-morrow. If it should turn out that we can’t use it I want you to dump the whole thing, head and all, and melt up the lead and forget that such a story ever passed through your hands. Because if it is safe—if we have got all our facts on straight—it’ll be a great beat. But if we haven’t it’ll be about the most dangerous chunk of potential libel that we could have knocking about that composing room. Do you get the point?”
Hemburg said he got it. His instructions were unusual; but, then, from Mr. Foxman’s words and manner, he realised that the story must be a most unusual one too. He carried out the injunctions that had been put upon him, literally and painstakingly. And while so engaged he solemnly pledged himself never again to touch another drop of rum so long as he lived. He had made the same promise a hundred times before. But this time was different—this time he meant it. He was tired of being a hack and a drudge. This was a real opportunity which Mr. Foxman had thrown in his way. It opened up a vista of advancement and betterment before him. He would be a fool not to make the most of it, and a bigger fool still ever to drink again.
Oh, but he meant it! It would be the straight and narrow path for him hereafter; the good old water-wagon for his, world without [339] end, amen. Noticeably more tremulous as to his fingers and his lips, but borne up with his high resolve, he put the clean proofs of the completed story into Mr. Foxman’s hands about midnight, and then hurried back upstairs to shape the layout for the first mail edition.
As Mr. Foxman read the proofs through he smiled under his moustache, and it was not a particularly pleasant smile, either. Printer’s ink gave to Singlebury’s masterpiece a sinister emphasis it had lacked in the typewritten copy; it made it more forceful and more forcible. Its allegations stuck out from the column-wide lines like naked lance tips. And in the top deck of the flaring scare head the name of John W. Blake stood forth in heavy black letters to catch the eye and focus the attention. Mr. Foxman rolled up the proof sheets, bestowed them carefully in the inside breast pocket of his coat, and shortly thereafter went home and to bed.
But not to sleep. Pleasing thoughts, all trimmed up with dollar marks, ran through his head, chasing away drowsiness. All the same he was up at eight o’clock that morning—two hours ahead of his usual rising time. Mrs. Foxman was away paying a visit to her people up-state—another fortunate thing. He breakfasted alone and, as he sipped his coffee, he glanced about him with a sudden contempt for the simple furnishings of his dining room. Well, there was some consolation—this time [340] next year, if things went well, he wouldn’t be slaving his life out for an unappreciative taskmaster, and he wouldn’t be living in this cheap, twelve-hundred-dollar-a-year flat, either. His conscience did not trouble him; from the moment the big notion came to him it had not. Greed had drugged it to death practically instantaneously.
No lees of remorse, no dreggy and bitterish reflections, touching upon the treachery he contemplated and the disloyalty to which he had committed himself, bothered him through that busy day. In his brain was no room for such things, but only for a high cheerfulness and exaltation. To be sure, he was counting his chickens before they were hatched, but the eggs were laid, and he didn’t see how they could possibly addle between now and the tallying time of achieved incubation. So, with him in this frame of mind, the day started. And it was a busy day.
His first errand was to visit the safety-deposit vaults of a bank on lower Broadway. In a box here, in good stable securities of a total value of about sixteen thousand dollars, he had the bulk of his savings. He got them out and took them upstairs, and on a demand note the president of the bank loaned him twelve thousand dollars, taking Mr. Foxman’s stocks and bonds as collateral. In the bank he had as a checking account a deposit somewhat in excess of two thousand dollars. Lying to Mrs. Foxman’s [341] credit was the sum of exactly ten thousand dollars, a legacy from an aunt recently dead, for which as yet Mrs. Foxman and her husband had found no desirable form of investment. Fortunately he held her power of attorney. He transferred the ten thousand from her name to his, which, with what he had just borrowed and what he himself had on deposit, gave him an available working capital of a trifle above twenty-four thousand dollars. He wrote a check payable to bearer for the whole stake and had it certified, and then, tucking it away in his pocket, he went round the corner into Broad Street to call upon John W. Blake at the Blake Bank. The supreme moment toward which he had been advancing was at hand.