"The Bubble Reputation"
by
HOW ANOTHER MAN’S WAS SOUGHT AND PRICKED
It was a stormy night in the autumn of 1930. The hour was about eleven. San Francisco lay in darkness, for the laborers at the gas works had struck and destroyed the company’s property because a newspaper to which a cousin of the manager was a subscriber had censured the course of a potato merchant related by marriage to a member of the Knights of Leisure. Electric lights had not at that period been reinvented. The sky was filled with great masses of black cloud which, driven rapidly across the star-fields by winds unfelt on the earth and momentarily altering their fantastic forms, seemed instinct with a life and activity of their own and endowed with awful powers of evil, to the exercise of which they might at any time set their malignant will.
An observer standing, at this time, at the corner of Paradise avenue and Great White Throne walk in Sorrel Hill cemetery would have seen a human figure moving among the graves toward the Superintendent’s residence. Dimly and fitfully visible in the intervals of thinner gloom, this figure had a most uncanny and disquieting aspect. A long black cloak shrouded it from neck to heel. Upon its head was a slouch hat, pulled down across the forehead and almost concealing the face, which was further hidden by a half-mask, only the beard being occasionally visible as the head was lifted partly above the collar of the cloak. The man wore upon his feet jack-boots whose wide, funnel-shaped legs had settled down in many a fold and crease about his ankles, as could be seen whenever accident parted the bottom of the cloak. His arms were concealed, but sometimes he stretched out the right to steady himself by a headstone as he crept stealthily but blindly over the uneven ground. At such times a close scrutiny of the hand would have disclosed in the palm the hilt of a poniard, the blade of which lay along the wrist, hidden in the sleeve. In short, the man’s garb, his movements, the hour–everything proclaimed him a reporter.
But what did he there?
On the morning of that day the editor of the Daily Malefactor had touched the button of a bell numbered 216 and in response to the summons Mr. Longbo Spittleworth, reporter, had been shot into the room out of an inclined tube.
“I understand,” said the editor, “that you are 216–am I right?”
“That,” said the reporter, catching his breath and adjusting his clothing, both somewhat disordered by the celerity of his flight through the tube,–“that is my number.”
“Information has reached us,” continued the editor, “that the Superintendent of the Sorrel Hill cemetery–one Inhumio, whose very name suggests inhumanity–is guilty of the grossest outrages in the administration of the great trust confided to his hands by the sovereign people.”
“The cemetery is private property,” faintly suggested 216.
“It is alleged,” continued the great man, disdaining to notice the interruption, “that in violation of popular rights he refuses to permit his accounts to be inspected by representatives of the press.”
“Under the law, you know, he is responsible to the directors of the cemetery company,” the reporter ventured to interject.
“They say,” pursued the editor, heedless, “that the inmates are in many cases badly lodged and insufficiently clad, and that in consequence they are usually cold. It is asserted that they are never fed–except to the worms. Statements have been made to the effect that males and females are permitted to occupy the same quarters, to the incalculable detriment of public morality. Many clandestine villainies are alleged of this fiend in human shape, and it is desirable that his underground methods be unearthed in the Malefactor. If he resists we will drag his family skeleton from the privacy of his domestic closet. There is money in it for the paper, fame for you–are you ambitious, 216?”