When he came on duty shortly after seven o’clock every famished, tortured fibre in him was calling out for whiskey. His thirst was riding him like an Old Man of the Seas. He sweated cold drops in his misery and, to bolster his resolution, called up every shred of moral strength that remained to him. Inside him a weakened will fought with an outraged appetite, and his jangled nerves bore the stress of this struggle between determination and a frightful craving.
In this state then, with his brain cells divided in their allegiance to him and his rebellious body in a tremor of torment, he was called upon very soon after his arrival at the office to carry out an important commission for the [364] man who had bestowed upon him his temporary promotion. Taking the command over the wire, he hurried upstairs to execute it.
Had he been comparatively drunk it is certain that Hemburg would have made no slip; automatically his fuddled mind would have governed his hand to mechanical obedience of the direction. But being comparatively sober—as sober as nearly twenty-four hours of abstinence could make him—poor Hemburg was in a swirl of mental confusion. At that, out-mastered as he was, he made only one mistake.
There were two stories lying in type, side by side, on the stone. One of them was to be played up in the leading position in the make-up. The other was to be dumped in the hell-box. That was the order, plain enough in his own mind. So one of them he dumped, and the other one he put in the forms to be printed.
The mistake he made was this: He dumped the wrong one and he ran the wrong one. He dumped the long Washington dispatch into a heap of metal linotype strips, fit only to be melted back again into leaden bars, and he ran the Singlebury masterpiece. That’s what Hemburg did—that’s all.
Well then, these things resulted: Mrs. Foxman lost her ten-thousand-dollar legacy and never thereafter forgave her husband for frittering away the inheritance in what she deemed to have been a mad fit of witless speculation. [365] Even though his money had gone with hers she never forgave him.
Mr. Foxman, having sold his birthright of probity and honour and self-respect for as bitter and disappointing a mess of pottage as ever mortal man had to swallow, nevertheless went undetected in his crookedness and continued to hold his job as managing editor of The Clarion.
General Robert Bruce Lignum, a perfectly innocent and well-meaning victim, was decisively beaten in his race for the United States senatorship. Mr. Blake saw to that personally—Mr. John W. Blake, who figured that in some way he had been double-crossed and who, having in silence nursed his grudge to keep it warm, presently took his revenge upon Foxman’s employer, since he saw no way, in view of everything, of hurting Foxman without further exposing himself. Also, to save himself and his associates from the possibility of travelling to state’s prison, Mr. Blake found it incumbent upon him to use some small part of his tainted fortune in corrupting a district attorney, who up until then had been an honourable man with a future before him of honourable preferment in the public service. So, though there were indictments in response to public clamour, there were no prosecutions, and the guilty ones went unwhipped of justice. And after a while, when the popular indignation engendered by The Clarion’s disclosure had entirely abated, and [366] the story was an old story, and the law’s convenient delays had been sufficiently invoked, and a considerable assortment of greedy palms at Albany and elsewhere had been crossed with dirty dollars, the East Side merger, in a different form and with a different set of dummy directors behind it, was successfully put through, substantially as per former programme. But by that time the original holders of Pearl Street trolley stocks had all been frozen out and had nothing to show for their pains and their money, except heart pangs and an empty bag to hold.
Bogardus, the lobbyist, and old Pratt, the class leader, and Lawyer Murtha, the two-faced—not one of whom, judged by the common standards of honest folk, had been actuated by clean motives—enjoyed their little laugh at Blake’s passing discomfiture, but afterward, as I recall, they patched up their quarrels with him and each, in his own special field of endeavour, basked once more in the golden sunshine of their patron’s favour, waxing fat on the crumbs which dropped from the greater man’s table.
Hemburg’s reward for striving, however feebly, to cure himself of the curse of liquor was that promptly he lost his place on The Clarion’s staff—Mr. Foxman personally attended to that detail—and because of his habits could not get a job on any other paper and became a borrower of quarters along Park Row.