The girl in the case : being the manoeuvres of the inadvertent Mr. Pepperton

Chapter I

The room of a commercial reporter, of course, cannot compare in interest with, for instance, the sanctum of a dramatic critic, any more than the personality of one occupant may be likened to that of the other. The commercial reporter is alert and up to snuff. He has to do with realities. The dramatic critic, on the other hand, wears a dreamy far-off look in his eyes ; his manner is languid and slightly superior, and his language takes on something of the tone and emphasis of our noted actors. Ladies who would ignore the commercial man could not help but notice the dramatic writer. They are almost certain to consider him literary at least, and, indeed, how can he help being so, dealing as he does with Shakespeare and all the rest, and interpreting for us those hidden meanings which the Elizabethan dramatist concealed in his work, to cause controversies centuries later.

The walls of the dramatic critic's room are covered with most beautiful photographs, each one signed in a more or less dashing manner by the g THE GIRL IN THE CASE subject of it, not written in a nice, legible round hand, as you and I would do it, strictly on the level, but with a verve and a dash and a great flourish, all in very black ink, at an angle of forty-five degrees.

In this romantic room you may observe Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs. Pat Campbell, the great Duse, Miss Ellen Terry, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Miss Lena Ashwell, and many others. Of the tenors, tragedians, basso-profundos and comedians, we take no account, conceited as they all are, for the beauty of the women eclipses their splendour, but if we are to consider mere men we may study on these walls certain ancient prints; Forest as this; Garrick as that; Edwin Booth as lago ; Sir Henry Irving in The Bells ; Salvini, the dignified Othello; Norman McKinnel as Lear, and John T. Raymond enacting Mark Twain *s hero. Col. Mulberry Sellers, the pioneer of the multi-millionaire, exclaiming: — "There's millions in it."

But in this serious recital we have nothing to do with these stagy personalities. We deal solely with the commercial reporter, who in turn deals solely with the hard facts of life, and only mention the Apollo of the Playhouse because his room happened to be next door to that of Mr. James Pepperton, who was responsible for the financial page of the Daily Dispatch in the important western city of Oshkazoo.

No : Jimmy's room was a picture of disorderly confusion, cluttered up with heaps of newspapers that nobody else in the office cared to look at : the Journal of Commerce, the Wall Street News, the Chemist and Druggist, the Stock Exchange Bulletin, the Marquette Mining Journal, the Northwestern Miller of Minneapolis, and such like trash, of no interest to the ordinary man, as compared with the dramatic papers and magazines, printed with pictures in half-tone on plate paper, that the office boy brought to the room next door. On the walls of Mr. Pepperton's office hung railway maps; maps in colour, showing the wheat areas, the corn sections of the country, the coal-mining districts, the rapidly-lessening timber limits, and everything pertaining to the natural resources of a great country belonging to a lavishly wasteful people. These evidences of material sources of wealth Jimmy had mitigated by clipping from various newspapers coarsely-drawn, hastily-printed, but pictorially clever cartoons regarding the political situation, hitting alike Republican and Democratic idiosyncrasies with an impartiality that would have shocked the partisan political editor, whose large and sumptuous room was entered from the end of the corridor.

At a very, very early hour in the day; an early hour that is, for the ofHce of a morning newspaper, namely, at ii a.m., there sauntered into this room our inadvertent friend, Jimmy Pepperton, a man of twenty-seven, with a good-humoured, intelligent face, whose hair was curly and dark, and whose moustache of jet black was somewhat jauntily trained in the manner that William of Germany affects. On this occasion Jimmy was not nearly so well groomed as usual. There was an air of dejection in his attitude as he seated himself in the swivel chair, which, turned to the right, faced a much pigeon-holed desk, each compartment crammed full of documents relating to the various resources of the country, and swung to the left brought Jimmy's knees under a table supporting a disreputablelooking typewriter that the commercial man could manipulate in a marvellous way upon occasion, tapping out a bewildering array of figures with shrewd estimates of crops or railway returns, which showed up very learnedly next morning on the commercial page, making you think that a much older and wiser person than Jimmy had composed them.

Mr. Pepperton, quite palpably not in the best of humour, savagely kicked the door shut, planted himself in the swivel chair, rested his elbows on the desk, and bent down his face into his hands, a posture partaking of hopeless despair, which although it would have seemed perfectly natural had the dreamy-eyed dramatic critic adopted it, appeared incongruous in this chaotic chamber of statistics.

Not to embarrass our plain narrative with an unsolved mystery at the very beginning, it may be boldly stated at once that Jimmy had arrived in his office after a most disquieting interview with the father of his fiancee, and that objectionable, boisterous, rude, conceited man had declared with unnecessary emphasis that Jimmy would never be allowed to marry Gwendoline Armstrong, to whom he had been engaged for the last two years without any objection being raised. John Armstrong, the desired father-in-law, did not move in the glittering circles of high society, for he had

A CABBAGE PLANT ii begun business in a very humble way as a seller of vegetables. At first the sign above his door nominated him a greengrocer, but as the business extended, Armstrong dropped the word "green," and every one who had done business with him agreed that the designation did not apply to so shrewd an individual as the enterprising tradesman.

Besides his central premises that supplied customers with potatoes, strawberries, lettuce, asparagus, turnips, and other succulent products of the earth, he had established here and there branch houses, and it was evident that by and by the retail vegetarian trade of the city would fall principally into Mr. Armstrong's capable hands. Latterly he had made a good deal of money in landed property transactions, which the growth of the city and his own extensive knowledge of suburban market gardens enabled him to carry off with great advantage to his bank account. He even ventured on the treacherous quicksands of the Stock Exchange, dealing with wheat and what-not, all to his own enrichment.

Up to this point the engagement of the genial Jimmy Pepperton to Gwennie Armstrong, six years his junior, had been looked upon with favour, for quite aside from the usefulness of the two occupations, it was generally held that a member of the editorial staff of a newspaper so prosperous as the Daily Dispatch held a social position superior to that of a grocer, green or otherwise. But after all, in these modern days, money talks, and John Armstrong realised that the only daughter of a man now worth several hundred thousand dollars made no great catch of it when she attached herself to a youth getting thirty dollars a week, and holding a somewhat precarious position on a journal whose proprietor might dismiss him at a word.

John Armstrong, in his bluff, offhand manner, for being connected remotely with horticulture he prided himself on calling a spade a spade, attempted that morning to direct Mr. Pepperton's attention to the ever-increasing discrepancy between the position of his daughter on the one hand, and that of a small-salaried journalist on the other.

''And hang social status ! " added the rough-andready John, who was growing corpulent, as success after success came to him.

Although usually a placid person, Jimmy possessed a temper of his own, and it waxed warm. He was in love with the girl, he protested, but : "Pooh, pooh ! " said the grocer, waving aside such an unbusiness-like proposition, with a gesture of his fat right hand. He was a man who could not brook opposition ; no self-made, prosperous person can, and finding the young fellow obstinate, as he called it, he easily descended from reasoning and persuasion to threats.

"In the first place," he cried, bringing his stout fist down on his desk, "I forbid you the house, and you must give me your word that you will neither attempt to see Gwennie, nor write to her."

" I will make no such promise ! " declared Jimmy strenuously, "and as for you and your grocery stores, you can go to thunder. I'm twenty-seven years of age, and Gwennie is more than twenty-one, so if she consents to receive me, and allows me to write to her, I shall do so in spite of all the other Armstrongs in .the universe."

*'Oh, very well! Oh, very well," reiterated Grocer John with firmness. ''We'll see about that, and I warn you, young man, that I shall have you out of the Dispatch office before a month is past."

At this Jimmy rose with the dignity that pertains to a commercial editor, buttoned his well-fitting morning coat with a certain definiteness of determination across his manly chest, and without another word left the business premises of John Armstrong and Company, dealers in horticultural produce. In a somewhat perturbed frame of mind he reached his office in the Dispatch building at eleven o'clock in the morning, which gave him time to glance over his correspondence before the opening of the Board of Trade, where the daily struggle in wheat or corn or rye or oats took place. Instead of opening his letters, he sat for some time with his head in his hands. As his temper cooled, common sense returned with some consolation in hand. He felt convinced that, notwithstanding the threat, John Armstrong did not possess the power to interfere with his position on the Dispatch^ and he reflected that probably the dealer in produce had no real inclination to injure him. If he had been a less happy-go-lucky fellow, thinking good of all men, in spite of his wheat-pit experience, he might have known that a man like John Armstrong does not rise rapidly in the financial world without some ruthless bulldog qualities which take little account of an opponent's convenience.

Just as he was about to leave his room, the door opened, and Mr. Wentworth Blake, the managing editor, entered, carrying an open letter in his hand. Blake, beside being managing editor, owned a controlling share of the Dispatch, and therefore so far as that journal was concerned, might be termed monarch of all he surveyed. He was a stern, reticent man, who feared only two things on this earth ; first, the large advertiser, certainly a most important individual to any one responsible for the revenue-producing side of a newspaper, and, secondly, a very small and no-account man, as one might estimate him, the subscriber, who contributed but a few cents daily to the income of the journal. It was one of the strong Mr. Blake's weaknesses that he would pay more attention to a complaining letter from an old subscriber than he would to a round-robin from his combined staff. The consequence was that any member of the editorial force, no matter how important a position he held, always became unhappy when he saw the solemn Mr. Blake enter his room with a frown on his brow, and a letter in his hand.

"Good morning, Mr. Pepperton," began the managing editor. "I have here a somewhat serious communication from an important business man in this city, which he has taken the trouble to send to me by a special messenger, who is now in my room awaiting a reply . As this accusation of inaccuracy pertains to your department, I thought it well to hear what you have to say before making any response."

Mr. Blake paused at this juncture, as was a habit of his, to allow the purport of his message to sink into the listener's mind.

''What is the complaint, Mr. Blake?" asked James Pepperton, with a sinking of the heart.

'*It deals with the wholesale price of cabbages. The figure you quote in this morning's issue is seventeen. My informant states that the correct price is twenty. What have you to say to that ? "

''I have to say, Mr. Blake, the only thing that can be said regarding such an accusation, which is that a great deal depends on the man who makes it."

*'I fail to see the point of your observation, Mr. Pepperton. I may be a little slow-minded, but I confess it is difficult to understand what bearing the identity of the complainant has upon a question of fact. The price of a single copy of the Daily Dispatch is three cents on week days, and five cents for a Sunday issue. If a statement reached me that a man was compelled to pay, say, five cents for to-day's paper, or eight cents for last Sunday's issue, I should say it didn't matter who made the indictment so long as he proved the fact, and I should at once insist on our business manager seeing that this customer was fairly treated."

" If you will pardon me, Mr. Blake, the two cases are not exactly parallel. The cost of the Dispatch is a fixed price, and does not fluctuate day by day. On the other hand, the price of cabbages is a figure that varies hour by hour. At best I am able only to strike an average, basing my calculations on what I learn from various buyers and various sellers. If, then, you get a communication from a man who buys cabbages, it is but human nature that he should estimate the figure I give as too high, while if he is a seller, he thinks it too low. I say that the average price at which cabbages could be purchased and sold yesterday was seventeen. There may have been sales as high as twenty, but I did not hear of them. It is quite possible that this morning twenty is the correct figure. That I shall not know until this afternoon."

"I must say, Mr. Pepperton, that I have heard this same excuse on several occasions, and I am getting just a little tired of it."

"The excuse, Mr. Blake, is like the price of our paper. It never changes. No matter who may be your commercial editor, he will find it impossible to please both buyer and seller. Indeed, the more industrious and honest he is, the greater will be the number of criticisms."

Both managing editor and subordinate had been standing during this dialogue, but the former now took a chair, and waved the latter to a seat.

"I cannot permit so important a matter to be dismissed in such an airy fashion, Mr. Pepperton. An inaccurate commercial page is not only useless to our business subscribers, but hurts the reputation of the sheet itself, by undermining public confidence in it. Rightly or wrongly, therefore, as personally I understand little of your department, I am compelled to depenu upon information received from outside parties, and as other newspapers succeed in securing the services of exact writers, I must either insist upon exactitude from those I employ, or make an effort to get better service elsewhere. I hope for your own sake you will realise the seriousness of the position.'*

"I do, Mr. Blake, certainly. It may perhaps be injudicious for me to point out that you know, nothing of the difficulties which other journals are constantly meeting. You cannot tell by a glance at a rival commercial page whether it is accurate or not. It is possible that my colleague on the Daily Courier, of this city, is at the present moment being hauled over the coals because some darned fool has written in to his managing editor."

The hot-headed Mr. Pepperton saw the eyelids of his chief narrow and his firm lips compress, and being after all quick to take a hint, he realised that this line of talk was making an impression contrary to his own interests, however reasonable it might appear to himself.

"Can we not postpone the consideration of this matter until the afternoon, Mr. Blake, when I shall not only be more at leisure, but also have obtained definite information to place before you ? "

"No," said the manager curtly, "this must be settled now."

"Very well, Mr. Blake. Within five minutes I should be on the floor of the Board of Trade, and as the wheat market is a little jumpy, I want to watch it. Will you, therefore, allow me to telephone a colleague to do the watching until I come ? "

"Agreed," snapped the manager.

The interval between taking the receiver from its hook, and replacing it, was short in point of time, but very long indeed so far as its influence on the affairs of Mr. James Pepperton was concerned.

B

It gave him a few minutes in which to think hard. He was calhng up WilHam J. Higgins, the man who held a similar position to his own, on the Daily Courier. It happened that Higgins had left the Courier office, and Pepperton knew he was on his way to the Board of Trade, therefore an interval of silence elapsed before Higgins' ear could be brought to the other end of the line, and during that interval Jimmy arrived at a conclusion momentous so far as his career was concerned. He realised in a flash that his inadvertency — it was the dramatic critic who had called him the inadvertent Mr. Pepperton — was likely to be his ruin. He had explained the position to Mr. Blake, yet he felt instinctively that this made no impression upon the managing editor's mind. Remembering his failure either to coerce or conciliate the enterprising John Armstrong, he surmised that the letter which the special messenger brought was from him. Should such be the case, the document in Blake's hand was in reality Armstrong's declaration of war, indicating that the time for compromise had passed. If Jimmy possessed brains at all, an illusion he always entertained, he said to himself now had arrived the opportunity to use them.

There were just two things to do, and if he failed to accomplish them, he would next day be hunting another job. First, he must defeat John Armstrong; second, he must convince Wentworth Blake, and neither of these desirable objects could be attained by mere words. There was now required on his part some definite action that should prove invincible. Until he saw the accusing letter he could not formulate plans. The manager saw Jimmy's brow corrugate, and his upper lip stiffen as he waited for the dulcet voice of Higgins, but thought it was caused by the delay in the telephonic response.

"That you, Higgins? Well, see here, Billy, as things look now I cannot attend the session. Would you kindly type out your stuff in duplicate, and let me have a copy? Thanks awfully. Yes. Scoops are barred to-day. There's a truce between us for twenty-four hours. That's all right, Billy. Good boy. I'll do as much for you some day. So long 1 "

He hung up the receiver, and turned towards his gloomy-faced employer.

"Must I infer," asked Blake, "that you and Mr. Higgins have an understanding regarding com-, mercial work, to save yourselves trouble at the expense of the papers paying your salaries ? "

But Jimmy was in fighting mood, and the answer his employer received was not so apologetic as he had expected.

"You may infer, Mr. Blake, that I will not allow the interests of the Daily Dispatch to be jeopardised simply because some imbecile with an axe to grind has written a lying letter to a credulous manager."

Blake rose to his feet in wrath. No employee had ever dared to address him in this fashion before.

"My young friend, do you know to whom you are talking ? "

"Yes : and I know exactly what a man who holds the whip hand will say about giving me a week's notice, and my jeopardising my position, and all

B 2 that sort of thing, but office discipline is something we can discuss later on. Verbally I hand you my resignation now, and will put it in writing this afternoon, so you don't need to worry your mind about that. What you and I must attend to just at present is that common or garden succulent vegetable, the cabbage, and I can do justice to only one thing at a time. If in settling this question I am compelled to show that cabbage-heads very often grow on human shoulders, don't blame me should the proof turn out to be personally uncomplimentary. I say the man w^ho wrote you that letter is a liar, a fact which I am going to prove, therefore kindly sit down and hand me his communication."

Now, it ^happens that a man may appear adamant to his fellows, and yet be merely flesh and blood after all: "A lath painted to look like iron," as Bismarck said of a celebrated British statesman. The adamantine Blake hesitated for a moment, wavered, sat down, then passed the letter to Pepperton. His pale face flushed a little as he did this, and then he tried to save it by hedging.

**I do what you are good enough to command, Mr. Pepperton, simply because you are no longer a member of my staff."

**0h, I quite recognise the increased importance of my position, Mr. Blake. I have risen from the status of a minion on this paper to be an outsider, whose letters to you hereafter will receive immediate attention. If ever I become managing editor of the Daily Dispatch, I'll stand by my men until they are proved either incompetent or corrupt. This letter, I observe, is signed by Mr. Armstrong, the head of that rising firm, John Armstrong and Company, with headquarters on Washington Street, and nineteen branches in various parts of the city and suburbs. I pass over the portion of his letter in which he eulogises the advantages, or, as he puts it, the necessity of accuracy in the commercial page of a newspaper. I agree with that."

"Then," coldly interrupted Mr. Blake, "one section at least is not a lie."

"Oh, the skilful liar always begins by setting down an indisputable truth. This makes the lie which follows all the more effective. Mr. Armstrong writes that your commercial editor has quoted cabbages at seventeen, when the real price is twenty. I pass lightly over the fact that the firm of John Armstrong and Company is the largest dealer in cabbages in this town."

"Quite so," said Blake calmly. "But remember it is both a buyer and a seller, so your former charge of partiality falls to the ground."

"Apparently, but not actually. Armstrong sells publicly, but he buys privately. He therefore wishes the quotation in the daily paper to be as high as possible. The private buying he can look after without the aid of the Press, and so large a purchaser is nearly always able to obtain a figure below the market rate. Now, to clinch his lie, knowing himself to be quite safe, as he is writing to an editor, and not to a cabbage dealer, he says that he will buy all the cabbages you can offer at nineteen, and thus make money, because the real price is twenty. To you that sounds convincing."

"I must confess it does," replied Blake sternly.

"Here is a well-known, reputable business man who backs his statement by taking a risk."

"Quite so, Mr. Blake. Now your own good faith comes into question."

"Who questions it?"

"I do. I believe you have condemned me unheard."

"Oh, that is nonsense," replied Blake, "and quite in keeping with the impertinent bosh, if I may call it so, that you have chosen to utter since I entered this room."

" Do you mean to say you will give me a chance to prove your own paper in the right ? "

"Of course I mean it."

"Oh, well, if that is the case," cried Jimmy, with an air of surprise, as one to whom an unexpected concession has been made, "there will be no difficulty. I suppose Mr. Armstrong's messenger is still waiting in your room ? "

"Undoubtedly."

"Then I wish you to reply, courteously acknowledging his letter; thanking him for the same, and stating that you will act at once upon its contents if he agrees to back you up in whatever action I may take, and I, on my part," promised Jimmy generously, as if one concession demanded another, "will withdraw my resignation so that you may make good your word to Mr. Armstrong, and discharge me forthwith."

"But, my dear fellow, I don't wish to discharge you if this accusation is untrue."

"Of course you don't. No one ever accused you of being unjust when facts were fully set before you, Mr. Blake. What I have complained of, I beg you to remember, is that you jump at a conclusion on insufficient information, and that conclusion is invariably against whatever member of your staff the impeachment is aimed at. In this case I not only guarantee to convince you, but without seeing Mr. Armstrong at all, I shall trust to his presumable fairness to admit he was in the wrong. Therefore, you see, I have undertaken to satisfy not only my own chief, but also the individual who brings the imputation against me."

" Well," said Mr. Wentworth Blake, with a sigh of relief, for he was not at heart a courageous man, and this controversy had become a little too strenuous for his liking, "nothing could be more straightforward. I'm no stickler for personal deference. My whole soul is wrapped up in the Daily Dispatch:'

"And mighty poor wrapping paper it makes, they tell me, with this rotten new wood pulp stuff you're buying for the sake of economy. But so that there may be no mistake, I will, with your permission, just type out the letter to Mr. Armstrong, then if it meets your approval, you can sign it and send it off without further delay."

"Very good," said Wentworth Blake, surprised to find that he had never before quite appreciated how resourceful a person young Pepperton was.

The latter placed a sheet of Dispatch editorial writing-paper in the machine, and his nimble fingers flew over the keys as if he were playing the "Dollar Princess" waltz.

"There you are, sir," he said, handing the result to his employer.

The latter read it carefully.

"That's all right," he said, and taking a fountain pen from his waistcoat pocket, he attached a scrawl, which was an excellent signature to procure upon a cheque, for the Daily Dispatch was rated as being worth a round million.

With the signed letter in his hand, Blake rose.

"Anything else I can do for you, Mr. Pepperton ? " he inquired, with a ghost of a smile hovering round the corners of his severe lips.

"Yes," said Jimmy seriously, "but the next thing I ask you to do for me will depend on Mr. Armstrong's reply. If he refuses to stand by his letter, I shall not trouble further about the matter."

"Oh, if he refuses to stand by his letter," decided Blake, "it will show he has written what he knows is not true."

"Such is precisely my own view," replied Pepperton, "and if you are convinced of that fact, may I take it I shall hear no more about this indictment ? "

"You will hear no more of it from me," promised Blake, as he left the room.

The young man turned to his telephone, and rung up his friend Ned Walton, a young attorney-at-law into whose way Jimmy flung all the business he could.

"That you, Ned? This is Jimmy Pepperton. There is a letter here from a man who, among other things, says * I will take all the cabbages you can send me at nineteen.' "

"At nineteen what? " asked the lawyer.

"Never you mind. We're talking in the terms of the Producer's Exchange, and I don't ask you to worry your limited intellect with such. What I wish to know is, does this sentence form a contract ? In other words, can the writer be compelled to do what he says he will ? "

"Certainly; if the receiver of the letter cares to hold him to it. If you were in London, you'd need to have the letter stamped at Somerset House with a sixpenny Government infliction, but such formality is not necessary in America."

"Thanks, Ned. Ever so much obliged. I'll pay you for this when I get rich."

"Oh, that's^all right, Jimmy. Good-bye."

Pepperton next rang up a produce dealer, a friend of his in the market square, a reasonably honest trader in a large way of business, and said —

"Is Mr. Stevens there?"

Stevens was sent for, and inquired as usual —

"Who's that?"

"This is James Pepperton, of the Dispatch, I say, Stevens, do you remember telling me yesterday that cabbages stood at seventeen ? "

"So they dfd."

" Have they risen since then ? "

"No : rather the other way about. Several trainloads have fallen on the market with a dull thud. Still, you are safe to put prices in to-morrow's paper at from sixteen and a half to seventeen."