"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 Sat.u.r.day. 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."

Dog-tired and happier than any poor dog of a newspaper man has a right to be, Singlebury went to his room and to bed. And when finally he fell asleep he dreamed the second chapter of that orange-blossomy dream of his.

Being left to himself, Mr. Foxman read Singlebury's copy through page by page, changing words here and there, but on the whole enormously pleased with it. Then he touched a buzzer b.u.t.ton under his desk, being minded to call into conference the chief editorial writer and the news editor before he put the narrative into type. Now it happened that at this precise moment Mr. Foxman's own special boy had left his post just outside Mr. Foxman's door to skylark with a couple of ordinary copy boys in the corridor between the city room and the Sunday room, and so he didn't answer the summons immediately. The fact was, he didn't hear the bell until Mr. Foxman impatiently rang a second and a third time. Then he came running, making up a suitable excuse to explain his tardiness as he came. And during that half minute of delay there leaped out of nowhere into Mr. Foxman's brain an idea--an idea, horned, hoofed and hairy--which was to alter the current of his own life and, directly or indirectly, the lives of scores of others.

It would seem I was a trifle premature, back yonder near the beginning of this chapter, when I used the line: Six-thirty-four--enter the villain.

Because, as I now realise, the villain didn't enter then. The villain did not enter until this moment, more than forty-eight hours later, entering not in the guise of a human being but in the shape of this tufted, woolly demon of a notion which took such sudden lodgment in Mr.

Foxman's mind. Really, I suppose we should blame the office boy. His being late may have been responsible for the whole thing.

He poked a tow head in at the door, ready to take a scolding.

"D'yer ring, sir?" he inquired meekly.

"Yes, three times," said Mr. Foxman. "Where have you been?"

"Right here, sir. Somethin' you wanted, sir?"

"No; I've changed my mind. Get out!"

Pleased and surprised to have escaped, the towhead withdrew. Very deliberately Mr. Foxman lit a cigar, leaned back in his chair, and for a period took mental accounting of his past, his present and his future; and all the while he did this a decision was being forged for him, by that busy devilish little tempter, into shape and point and permanency.

In his fingers he held the means of making himself independent--yes, even rich. Why--he began asking himself the plaguing question and kept on asking it--why should he go on working his life out for twelve thousand dollars a year when, by one safe, secret stroke, he could make twelve times twelve thousand, or very possibly more? He knew what happened to newspaper executives who wore out in the harness. Offhand, he could think of half a dozen who had been as capable as he was, as active and as zealous, and as single-purposed in their loyalty to the sheets they served as he was to this sheet which he served.

All of these men had held high editorial posts and, in their prime, had drawn down big salaries, as newspaper salaries go. Where were they now, since they had grown old? He knew where they were--mighty good and well he knew. One trying to run a chicken farm on Staten Island and daily demonstrating that a man who could manage a newspaper does not necessarily know how to manage a flock of temperamental White Leghorn hens; one an exchange editor, a neglected and unconsidered figure of obscurity, a nonent.i.ty almost, and a pensioner, practically, in the same shop whose affairs his slackened old hands had once controlled; one or two more of them actually needy--out of work and out at elbows; and so on, and so forth, through the list.

Well, it rested with Mr. Foxman to avert such a finish to his own career; the instrument fitted to combat the prospect was here in his grasp. Temptation, whispering to him, bade him use it--told him he would be a sorry fool not to use it. What was that line about Opportunity's knocking once at every man's door? And what was that other line about there being a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune?

After all, it meant only that he break faith with five men:--with his employer, General Lignum, who trusted him; with his underling, Singlebury, who had done a good job of work for him; and with three others whom, for the sake of convenience, he mentally grouped together--Bogardus and Pratt and Murtha, the lawyer. These three he eliminated from the equation in one puff of blue cigar smoke. For they were all three of them crooks and plotters and double dealers, masters of the dirty trick and the dirty device, who conspired together to serve not the general good, but their own squalid and contemptible ends.

For General Lignum he had more heed. Perhaps I should say here that until this hour this man, Hobart Foxman, had been an honest man--not just reasonably honest but absolutely honest, a man foursquare as a smokehouse. Never before had it occurred to him to figure up to see whether honesty really paid. He did some brisk figuring now.

After all, did it pay? As a reporter, back yonder in the old days when he, a raw cub, first broke into this wearing, grinding newspaper game, he had despised fakers and faking and the petty grafting, the cheap sponging to which he saw some reporters--not many, perhaps, but some--descending. As an a.s.sistant sporting editor, after his first promotion from the ranks, he had been content to live upon his somewhat meagre salary, refusing to fatten his income by taking secret pay from prize-fight promoters wishful of getting advertis.e.m.e.nts dressed up as news stories into the columns of the sporting page. As a staff correspondent, first at Albany and then at Washington, he had walked wide of the lobbyists who sought to corrupt and succeeded in corrupting certain correspondents, and by corrupting them were able sometimes to colour the news, sometimes to suppress it. Always the dispatches he signed had been unbiased, fair, above the board.

To be sure, Foxman had played office politics the while he went up, peg by peg. To men above him he had been the a.s.siduous courtier, crooking the pregnant knee before those who might help him onward. But, then, that was a part of the game--office politics was. Even so, playing it to the top of his bent, he had been on the level. And what had being on the level brought him? It had brought him a place of executive authority and a salary of twelve thousand a year. And these two things--the place and the twelve thousand--he would continue to have and to hold and to enjoy for just so long as he was strong enough to fight off ambitious younger men, climbing up from below as he had climbed; or, worse luck, for just so long as he continued to please the mercurial millionaire who two years earlier, at public outcry, had bought _The Clarion_, lock, stock and barrel, with its good will and fixtures--just as a man might buy a cow with its calf in the drover's pen.

That brought him round again to a consideration of General Lignum.

Metaphysically he undressed the general and considered him naked. He turned him about and looked at him on every side. The result was not flattering to that impressive and dignified gentleman. Was General Lignum so deserving of consideration? What had General Lignum ever done in all his luxurious days to justify him to a place in the sun? Lignum never worked for his millions; he inherited them. When Lignum bought _The Clarion_, then as now a losing property, he had been actuated by the same whim which makes a spoiled child crave the costliest toy in the toy shop and, like that spoiled child, he would cast it aside, unmindful of its future, in the same hour that he tired of his newest possession and of the cost of its upkeep.

Wasn't Lignum lavishing wads of his easy-come, easy-go money on it now, because of his ambition to be a United States senator? Most certainly he was--for that and nothing else. Barring his wealth, which was a gift to him, and his newspaper, which was a plaything, what qualified this dilettante to sit in the seats of the mighty? What did Lignum know of the toil and the sweat and the gifts spent by men, whose names to him were merely items in a pay roll, to make _The Clarion_ a power in the community and in the country? What did he care? In the last a.n.a.lysis what anyhow was this General Robert Bruce Lignum except a bundle of pampered selfishness, wrapped up in a membrane, inclosed in a frock coat and lidded under a high hat? When he got that far Mr. Foxman decided he owed Lignum nothing, as compared with what Lignum owed him. Well, here was a chance to collect the debt, with back dividends and interest accrued. He would collect. He would make himself independent of the whims of Lignum, of the necessity of daily labour, of the uncertainties of his position, of the certainty of the oncoming of age when his hand must tire and his wits grow blunted.

This left to be disposed of--only Singlebury. And Singlebury, in Mr.

Foxman's mind, was now become the least of the factors concerned. In this, his new scheme of things that had sprung full-grown from the loins of a great and a sudden desire, a Singlebury more or less mattered not a whit. In the same moment that he decided to discard Singlebury the means of discarding Singlebury came to him.

That inspiration clarified the situation tremendously, interlocking one part of his plan with the others. In any event the lips of Pratt, Bogardus and Murtha were closed, and their hands tied. By now Lignum was at least a thousand miles out at sea. In the working out of his scheme Foxman would be safe from the meddlings and muddlings of Old Lignum.

Already he had begun to think of that gentleman as Old Lignum instead of as General Lignum, so fast were his mental aspects and att.i.tudes altering. Finally, with Singlebury out of the way, the plot would stand up, a completed and almost a perfect edifice.

However, there was one contingency to be dared. In a way it was a risk, yet an inevitable one. No matter what followed he must put the expose story into print; that absolutely was requisite to the proper development of the plan. For Mr. Foxman well knew the psychological effect of the sight of cold type upon the minds of men planning evil things. He didn't know John W. Blake personally, but he knew John W.

Blake's kind, and he figured John W. Blake as being in his essentials no different from the run of his kind. Nor was he wrong there, as will appear. Moreover, the risk, while necessary to the carrying out of his present designs, was a risk only in the light of possibilities arising later. Being now fully committed to the venture, he told himself he shouldn't much care if detection did come after the accomplishment of his purpose. Long before that could happen, he, having made his pile and being secure in the possession of a fortune, would be able to laugh in the faces of his own little world, because anyhow he meant to move on into another circle very soon thereafter. Yes; there was one risk to be taken. On the instant that he arrived at this point in his reasonings he set about taking it.

First off, he read Singlebury's copy through once more, amending the wording in a few places. He made certain accusations direct and forcible where the reporter, in his carefulness, had been a trifle vague. Then he drew to him a block of copy paper and set about heading and subheading the story. In the days when he sat in the slot of a copy desk Mr. Foxman had been a master hand at headlining; with disuse his knack of hand had not grown rusty. He built and balanced a three-column, three-decker top caption and, to go under it, the heavy hanging indentions and the bold cross lines. From the body of the ma.n.u.script, also, he copied off several a.s.sertions of a particular emphasis and potency and marked them to go at the top of the story in blackface, with a box about them. This much done, he went to his door and hailed the night city editor, sitting a few yards away.

"Oh, Sloan," he said, "send a boy upstairs for McMa.n.u.s, will you?"

"McMa.n.u.s isn't here to-night," answered Sloan. He got up and came over to his chief. McMa.n.u.s was the make-up editor.

"This isn't McMa.n.u.s' night off, is it?" asked Mr. Foxman.

"No, Mac's sick," explained Sloan; "he was complaining last night and went home early, and I stayed on to make up his last two pages for him.

A little while ago his wife telephoned in from Bayside that he was in bed with a high fever. She said the doctor said it was a touch of malaria and that Mac couldn't possibly get back to work for a week, anyhow."

"I see," said Mr. Foxman slowly. He ran his eye over the city room.

"Whom did you put on in his place?"

"Gykeman."

"Gykeman, eh?" Mr. Foxman considered a moment. This news of McMa.n.u.s'

indisposition pleased him. It showed how willing was Fate to keep on dealing him the winning cards. But Gykeman wasn't his choice for the task he had in mind; that called for someone of a less inquiring, less curious mind than Gykeman owned. Again his eye ranged the city room. It fell on a swollen and dissipated face, purplish under the electric lights.

"I believe you'd better bring Gykeman back downstairs," he said, "I want him to read copy on that Wilder poisoning case that's going to trial to-morrow in General Sessions. Let's see." He went through the pretense of canva.s.sing the available material in sight. Then:

"Hemburg will do. Put Hemburg on make-up until Mac is well again."

"Hemburg?" The city editor's eyebrows arched in surprise. "I thought you didn't think very highly of Hemburg, Mr. Foxman."

"Hemburg's all right," said Mr. Foxman crisply; "it's his personal habits I don't fancy very much. Still, with half a load on Hemburg is capable enough--and I never saw him with less than half a load on. He can handle the make-up; he used to be make-up man years ago on the old _Star-Ledger_, it seems to me. Put him on instead of Gykeman--no, never mind; send him in here to me. I'll tell him myself and give him some good advice at the same time."

"Well, just as you think best," said Sloan, miffed that his own selection should have been rejected, but schooled to an unquestioning obedience by the seemingly slack--but really rigorous--discipline of a newspaper shop. "I'll send him right in."

Two minutes later Hemburg was standing in an att.i.tude of attention alongside Mr. Foxman's desk, and from his chair Mr. Foxman was looking up at him steadily.

"Hemburg," he stated, "I can't say that I've been altogether pleased with you here of late."

Hemburg put up a splotched, tremulous hand, to hide a weak mouth, and spoke in his own defence from between his fingers.

"Well, I'm sorry if anything has gone wrong, Mr. Foxman," he began; "I try----"

"I don't mean there's any particular complaint," stated Mr. Foxman, "only it struck me you've been getting into a rut lately. Or that you've been going stale--let's put it that way. On my own judgment I've given orders that you are to go on make-up temporarily, beginning to-night.

It's up to you to make good there. If you do make good, when McMa.n.u.s comes back I'll look round and see if there isn't something better than a forty-dollar-a-week copy-reading job for you in this office."

"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.