[Sam P. Davis, The Reporter's Revenge, from Short Stories (1886)]

 

THE REPORTER'S REVENGE.

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            " I have murder on my soul !"

            This appalling confession was made to me in a whisper across a table in a Kearny-street beer-cellar, one night a year ago.

            I started back so violently as to almost upset my chair. Then I stared in a horrified way at the man who made this dreadful admission. I searched for traces of the criminal in the clean-cut features, the mild blue eye, the broad forehead, and could find none. He looked far more like a student or a prosperous young clergyman than a murderer. So I laughed and asked him why his humor had taken so ghastly a turn.

            " I'm not joking," he said earnestly, and I noticed that the hand which he reached toward his beer-glass trembled a little.

            " You have noticed how regularly I turn up on this coast once a year, haven't you ?" he asked.

            I nodded.

            " Well, that's because my crime haunts me, and when I am free to travel I cannot keep away from the scene of it As editor of the Christian at Work in Chicago, I have a good thing financially, and can afford to go where I please when my annual vacation comes ; but whatever my resolves may be, my journeying ends in bringing me

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here. No, it isn't to see my friends ; I have none left in this part of the world. Only a few of the old boys like yourself remember me."

            Pausing to cast a furtive look around to see that we were not overheard, the editor of the Christian at Work leaned far over the table and asked in a low tone :

            " Do you remember Con Maloney ? "

            " Of the Post? Yes, poor fellow, he's dead."

            " Do you know how he died ? "

            " Yes ; he was killed by the Indians in Arizona. Con was recklessly brave and took to hunting Apaches for pastime."

            Leaning back in his chair, my companion took out his penknife and began filing his nails. Without looking up he said quietly :

            " I murdered him."

            Then, regarding me steadily, he added :

            '" As I mean to blow my brains out before morning, I don't mind telling you the particulars. It will lift a burden that I have carried now for nearly eight years alone. It is too heavy to be borne longer. I was reporting on the Chronicle, you remember, when Con was on the Post. We were warm friends, as you know, though that didn't prevent us from being active and unscrupulous rivals as reporters. Each of us was generally smarting under some triumph the other had won. I prided myself on being able not only to keep up with the procession, but on being usually a little ahead of it. Do you recall the hanging of Jose Hernandez, the Mexican bandit, at Bakersfield ? Well, Con and I were sent by our papers to report it. We reached the town early in the morning, and learned that the execution was to be at three in the afternoon. This would be too late for the Post, and I

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rejoiced over Con openly. It was expected that the bandit would play the coward on the scaffold. This would give me a fine opportunity for my descriptive powers. Con bore his chagrin better than I should have done. But I rejoiced so extravagantly over my good luck that he rose in wrath at last and left me. About two hours before the time set for the hanging I was in the office of the hotel bragging to the landlord and a group of the politicians and other local great men about the exclusive report of the execution next day's Chronicle would have, when a deputy rushed in and shouted :

            " Well, he's gone ! '

            "'Who's gone?' everybody asked.

            "'Why, Jose Hernandez.'

            "I dashed to the jail to learn the particulars of the murderer's escape. When the doors swung open for me and I entered the prison, a sight in the jail yard met my eyes that strangled the eager question in my throat. I saw Jose Hernandez hanging from the gallows, dead.

            " I must have fainted, or come very near it, for the next thing I remember was finding myself in a chair, dripping with water, and Con standing before me with a dipper in his hand.

            " 'Where am I ?' I asked.

            "'Away behind the procession, my boy,' grinned Con.

            "Then, with chucklings that maddened me, he related how he had outgeneraled me. He had had the assurance to go to the Sheriff and ask him to have the hanging at one instead of at three o'clock, to oblige the Post.

            "' I can't do it without Jose's consent,' said the Sheriff, to whom a metropolitan reporter was a great man. You'd better see him.'

            "And Con did see him. He actually went into the

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wretch's cell and inquired if he wouldn't just as soon be hanged then as later.

            "' All right,' Jose said—he was a contented fatalist, like most Mexicans—' it don't make any difference to me. Give me a drink of whisky, get me a cigarette, and give me a good send-off in the papers, and make it as soon as you like.'

            " And by —, sir !" cried the editor of the Christian at Work, smiting the table in the excitement bred by the recollection, "while I was bragging there at the hotel Con had the hanging all to himself, exhausted the subject in the Post and left me nothing for the Chronicle.

            " I bore my defeat with a semblance of good humor that deceived even Con himself," he went on, scowling.

            " When he told me a week later that his salary had been raised in reward I shook his hand in hearty congratulation ; when my own was lowered I kept the secret. I received so gaily the chaff of the boys that it gave them no pleasure to jeer at me. I smiled, but my heart was breaking.

            " You remember the Apache outbreak in '77, of course? I went to the front for the Chronicle, and Con, as usual, for the Post. We traveled together, roughed it together, fought with the troops against the Indians together, ate and slept together, and were the best of friends, as of old —so Con thought ; so everybody thought. They dubbed us 'The Newspaper Twins,' we were so fond of each other and so much together. Do you recall the hanging of six Apache prisoners at Camp Thomas in August of that year? Well, the scaffold was set up inside a high stockade just to the north of the parade ground. I arrived at the Camp in the morning, and after presenting myself to Colonel Yancy, the commandant, I walked over alone

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to the stockade to see the machinery which was to rid the earth of the six red devils that afternoon. Con, I had'nt seen for a month or more, we having attached ourselves to different scouting parties. As I entered the enclosure even my heart, hardened as it was by usage to dreadful scenes, felt a shock at the sight of the six nooses dangling in a row from the long beam. The sun was blazing down as it blazes nowhere else than in Arizona. A man stood on the platform with his back toward me, examining one of the ropes. No one else was in the stockade, which shut the gallows in from the sight of the Camp. I walked up the stair of unplained pine to the scaffold. The man turned. It was Con. We shook hands cordially, and talked jokingly of the dangers we had run and the strokes of enterprise we have achieved for our papers since parting.

            "' This,' said Con, half seating himself on the rude railing surrounding the platform, ' is going to be a wholesale sort of affair, isn't it ? They swing 'em off at noon, don't they ? '

            " Unless you can get them to oblige you by making it an hour or two earlier,' I said with a laugh.

            " Con laughed too, and asked if I would never forget that little victory of his at Bakersfield.

            "' I'll have the first go at this item, too,' he went on merrily, kicking one of the nooses and setting it swinging. My horse is better than yours, and I'll beat you to the telegraph station at the corners. I'll do it for twenty to ten. Take it ? '

            " No, I wouldn't take it. I knew his horse was better than mine, or any I could hire, or borrow or steal. Secretly I burned with impotent rage, but I looked him smilingly in the eye.

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            "' The bucks will die game, of course,' said Con kicking the noose again. Good idea to set them all off at once, isn't it ?"

            " I saw then that there was but one long trap, and that the supporting bolts were to be withdrawn by a pull at a lever, which was within a foot of where I leaned against the railing.

            Con kicked the swinging noose once more, and caught it in his hand as it returned.

            "' Did you ever think how it must feel to be hanged ?' he asked me, with a smile, as he worked the soaped rope through the hangman's knot. ' It seems to me that however dreadful the preliminaries may look to others, nature kindly sends a paralysis upon the brain long before the black cap shuts out the sunshine forever. The most hideous moment of all must be just when the trap caves from under your feet and you shoot down to oblivion. There is an appreciable interval of time between the beginning and end of that awful fall—and in that last instant of life how the mind must blaze and the heart pump ! It's the one thing that makes me shudder a little when I think, on a wakeful night sometimes, of the hangings I have seen. When I write my book—we're all going to write our book my boy, eh ?—I mean to work that business up with all the tragic power I've got in me. But no man can write with the vividness of truth about an experience he only imagines. How does it feel, anyhow? Ugh !'

            " Con had put the rope around his neck and drawn it tight enough to make the blood redden his face.

            " Take it off, Con !'

            " I cried this out with a horror of tone that struck Con as ludicrous, for he smiled, and to further torment me he walked upon the trap, held his arms stiffly by his

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side, as if pinioned, and lifted his eyes as though in prayer—as men do who are on the edge of the black precipice.

            " I pulled the lever !

            " God! He could not have thought faster in that last brief plunge that he had spoken of than I did when he darted down to his death. Bakersfield, his faster horse and the devil moved my arm for that stroke of murder.

            " I shot down the rough stairs, out from the inclosure, and shrieked till the blood filled my mouth. I pointed dumbly to the stockade when the soldiers came running in alarm.

            " He was as dead as my happiness when they hacked the rope in two with their sabers."

            The face of poor Con. Maloney's murderer had been flushed as he had progressed with his confession. Now it was as white as a dead man's, and horror shone in his eyes, as if they were looking again in reality upon the rude scaffold in the stockade.

            " Let us get out of this," he said, springing up and tugging his hat over his eyes.

            I insisted upon his going with me to my room. As his excitement died away he became weak, and yielded himself to my stronger will.

            " I lied to Colonel Yancy, and he believed me, of course," he explained in answer to my pressing questions.

            " He and everybody else knew Con and me to be friends. How could he doubt that it was what I said, a horrible accident ? Only the Camp carpenter was suspicious. He could not understand how his bolts had come from under the trap without a hand on the lever to help them. But he was a drunken private soldier, and nobody would insult me by listening to his talk. By

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agreement with the officers—to save the feelings of Con's relatives and friends—I telegraphed that he had fallen in a skirmish with the Apaches."

            A week ago I received a letter from Ujiji, Central Africa.

            " A year since," it reads, "I confided to you the history of the sin, which, by God's blessing has been the means of bringing me out of darkness into the light. You were used as a humble instrument of divine Providence to save me from the awful crime of self-murder. On my return to Chicago to my desk in the office of the Christian at Work, where I had wickedly written without Christian conviction in the language of the believer, a sense of my lost condition came upon me. I wrestled with the Lord and won the victory. A mighty zeal for souls filled me, and I sought this far field of labor, where many jewels are being added to my crown. There is but one drop of bitterness in my cup. I fear that you may destroy my usefulness by carelessly revealing your knowledge of the painful incident in my past life which occurred in Arizona. Let me urge you to remember that the safety of souls in this field, which is white unto the harvest and where laborers are few, depends upon your silence."

            After a rather long and very fervid exhortation to me to seek the Lord, the letter closes :

            "The prayerful look upon the face of that young man just before he was ushered to the judgment seat is a great comfort and solace to me, and moves me to believe that he might never again have been so fit to die had he lived to follow the profession of journalism, so full as I know it to be of sinful influences."

            Captain Lees will shortly leave for Ujiji.

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            In connection with "The Reporters Revenge" the following correspondence is not out of place :

Office of San Franciscan, February 21, 1884.

            DEAR SAM:—Joe and I have just been discussing the contribution you sent us for the opening number of the San Franciscan. We both agree that it's infernally bad rot, and, have pitched it, not into the waste-basket—for some blasted idiot might find it and print it—but into the stove. It is the crankiest rubbish you ever wrote, and we couldn't make head nor tail of it. As the case now stands, we have your name on the posters all over town as a contributor, and, Sam, we can't go back of these posters. So all have decided to write a story entitled "The Reporters Revenge," and tag your name to it. I hesitated at first about taking the liberty, but Joe assures me that you never take the slightest exceptions to anything your friends do and try—the rough criticisms in this letter—wherein we give vent to our lowest indignation and feel sorry that we can't take our time and vent more of it—will fall from you like water from a duck's back. Joe joins me in hearty malediction on your idiotic head; and we both send our best regards to Mrs. D.

            Yours fraternally,        

Arthur McEwen.

P. S.—Of course, I mean Con. Mahoney, in the sketch, and you know you always wanted to see him hung anyhow.

HOLSTEIN RANCH, CARSON CITY, September 18, 1885.

            DEAR MAC:—I am about publishing a book, and wishing to give it as much variety as possible, have concluded to run " The Reporter's Revenge," that sketch you were kind enough to write about a year ago and tack my name to. The sketch was so good that I have often thought of sending a bill for it, not so much from a mercenary motive as a desire to particularly test the exact value you put upon your own literary work. I hesitated at first about taking the liberty, but as Joe has frequently assured me that you never take the slightest exceptions to anything your friends do, I have decided to utilize it. Occasionally, when you think of a good thing, write it up and use my name as before. I may want to publish another book, and such things will help amazingly. I heard that Con swore like a pirate about me when he read the sketch, which pleased me very much. Mrs. D— joins in regards to you and yours.

            Fraternally,     

SAM DAVIS.