CHAPTER XVI.—THE EMPEROR’S CIGARS.

It is not the blood which flows at the front, my friends, that is the worst of war; it is the money corruption that goes on at the rear. In old Sparta, theft was not theft unless discovered in process of accomplishment, and those larcenous morals taught of Lycurgus would seem, on the tails of our own civil war, to have found widest consent and adoption throughout every department of government. The public hour reeled with rottenness, and you may be very sure the New York Customs went as staggeringly corrupt as the rest.

It is to my own proper shame that I should have fallen to have art or part or lot in such iniquities. Yet I went into them with open eyes and hands, and a heart—hungry as a pike’s—for whatever of spoil chance or skilfully constructed opportunity might place within my reach. My sole defense, and that now sounds slight and trivial even to my partial ears, was the one I advanced the other day; my two-ply hatred of government both for injuries done my region of the South as well as the personal ruin visited on me when my ill-wishers struck down that enterprise of steamed tobacco which was making me rich. That is all I may urge in extenuation, and I concede its meager insufficiency.

As I’ve said, I obtained an appointment as an inspector of Customs, and afterward worked side by side, and I might add hand and glove, with our old friends, Quin and Lorns of the Story of the Smuggled Silks. That fearsome honest Chief Inspector who so put my heart to a trot had been dismissed—for some ill-timed integrity, I suppose—sharply in the wake of that day he frightened me; and when I took up life’s burdens as an officer of the Customs, my companions, together with myself, were all black sheep together. Was there by any chance an honest man among us, he did not mention it, surely; nor did he lapse into act or deed that might have been evidence to prove him pure. Yes, forsooth! ignorance could be overlooked, drunkenness condoned, indolence reproved; but for that officer of our Customs who in those days was found honest, there shone no ray of hope. He was seized on and cast into outer unofficial darkness, there to exercise his dangerous probity in private life. There was no room for such among us; no peace nor safety for the rest while he remained. Wherefore, we of a proper blackness, were like so many descendants of Diogenes, forever searching among ourselves to find an honest man; but with fell purpose when discovered, of his destruction. We maintained a strictest quarantine against any infection of truth, and I positively believe, with such success, that it was excluded from our midst. That honest Chief Inspector was dismissed, I say; Lorns told me of it before I’d been actively in place an hour, and the news gave me deepest satisfaction.

That gentleman who was official head of the coterie of revenue hunters to which I was assigned was peculiarly the man unusual. His true name, if I ever heard it, I’ve forgot; among us of the Customs, he was known as Betelnut Jack. Lorns took me into his presence and made us known to one another early in my revenue career. I had been told stories of this man by both Lorns and Quin. They deeply reverenced him for his virtues of courage and cunning, and the praises of Betelnut Jack were constant in their mouths.

Betelnut Jack was at his home in the Bowery. Jack, in years gone by, had been a hardy member of one of those Volunteer fire companies which in that hour notably augmented the perils of an urban life. Jack was a doughty fighter, and with a speaking trump in one hand and a spanner-wrench in the other, had done deeds of daring whereof one might still hear the echo. And he became for these strong-hand reasons a tower of strength in politics; and obtained that eminence in the Customs which was his when first we met.

Betelnut Jack received Lorns and myself in his dingy small coop of a parlor. He was unmarried—a popular theory in accounting for this being that he’d been crossed in love in his youth. Besides the parlor, Jack’s establishment contained only one room, a bedroom it was, a shadow larger than the bed.

Betelnut Jack himself was wiry and dark, and with a face which, while showing marks of former wars, shone the seat of kindly good-humor.

There had been an actor, Chanfrau, who played “Mose, the Fireman.” Betelnut Jack resembled in dress his Bowery brother of the stage. His soiled silk hat stood on a dresser. He wore a long skirted coat, a red shirt, a belt which upheld—in a manner so absent-minded that one feared for the consequences—his trousers; these latter garments in their terminations were tucked inside the gaudy tops of calfskin boots; small and wrinkleless these, and fitting like a glove, with the yellow seams of the soles each day carefully re-yellowed to the end that they be admired of men. Betelnut Jack’s dark hair, a shade of gray streaking it in places, was crisp and wavy; and a long curl, carefully twisted and oiled, was brought down as low as the angle of his jaw just forward of each ear.

“Be honest, young man!” said Betelnut Jack, at the close of a lecture concerning my duties; “be honest! But if you must take wrong money, take enough each time to pay for the loss of your job. Do you see this?” And Jack’s hand fell on a large morocco-bound copy of “Josephus” which lay on his table. “Well, Lorns will tell you what stories I look for in that.”

And Lorns, as we came away, told me. Once a week it was the practice of each inspector to split off twenty per cent, of his pillage. He would, thus organized, pay a visit to his chief, the worthy Betel-nut Jack. As they gossiped, Jack’s ever-ready hospitality would cause him to retire for a moment to the bedroom in search of a demijohn of personal whisky. While alone in the parlor, the visiting inspector would place his contribution between the leaves of “Josephus,” and thereby the humiliating, if not dangerous, passage of money from hand to hand was missed.

There existed but one further trait of caretaking forethought belonging with the worthy Betelnut Jack. It would have come better had others of that crooked clique of customs copied Betelnut Jack in this last cautious characteristic. Justice is a tortoise, while rascality’s a hare; yet justice though shod with lead wins ever the race at last. Betelnut Jack knew this; and while getting darkly rich with the others, he was always ready for the fall. While his comrades drove fast horses, or budded brown-stone fronts, or affected extravagant opera and supper afterward with those painted lilies, in whose society they delighted, Betelnut Jack clung to his old rude Bowery nest of sticks and straws and mud, and lived on without a change his Bowery life. He suffered no improvements whether of habit or of habitat, and provoked no question-asking by any gilded new prosperities of life.

As fast as Betelnut Jack got money, he bought United States bonds. With each new thousand, he got a new bond, and tucked it safely away among its fellows. These pledges of government he kept packed in a small hand-bag; this stood at his bed’s head, ready for instant flight with him. When the downfall did occur, as following sundry years of loot and customs pillage was the desperate case, Betelnut Jack with the earliest whisper of peril, stepped into his raiment and his calfskin boots, took up his satchel of bonds, and with over six hundred thousand dollars of those securities—enough to cushion and make pleasantly sure the balance of his days—saw the last of the Bowery, and was out of the country and into a corner of safety as fast as ship might swim.

But now you grow impatient; you would hear in more of detail concerning what went forward behind the curtains of Customs in those later ’60’s. For myself, I may tell of no great personal exploits. I did not remain long in revenue service; fear, rather than honesty, forced me to resign; and throughout that brief period of my office holding, youth and a lack of talent for practical iniquity prevented my main employment in those swart transactions which from time to time took place. I was liked, I was trusted; I knew what went forward and in the end I had my share of the ill profits; but the plans and, usually, the work came from others of a more subtile and experienced venality.

In this affair of The Emperor’s Cigars, the story was this. I call them The Emperor’s Cigars because they were of a sort and quality made particularly for the then Imperial ruler of the French. They sold at retail for one dollar each, were worth, wholesale, seventy dollars a hundred, and our aggregate harvest of this one operation was, as I now remember, full sixty thousand dollars.

My first knowledge was when Lorns told me one evening of the seizure—by whom of our circle, and on what ship, I’ve now forgotten—of one hundred thousand cigars. They were in proper boxes, concealed I never knew how, and captured in the very act of being smuggled and just as they came onto our wharf. In designating the seizure, and for reasons which I’ve given before, they were at once dubbed and ever afterwards known among us as The Emperor’s Cigars.

These one hundred thousand cigars were taken to the Customs Depot of confiscated goods. The owners, as was our rule, were frightened with black pictures of coming prison, and then liberated, never to be seen of us again. They were glad enough to win freedom without looking once behind to see what became of their captured property.

It was one week later when a member of our ring, from poorest tobacco and by twenty different makers, caused one hundred thousand cigars, duplicates in size and appearance of those Emperor’s Cigars, to be manufactured. These cost two and one-half cents each; a conscious difference, truly! between that and those seventy cents, the wholesale price of our spoil. Well, The Emperor’s Cigars were removed from their boxes and their aristocratic places filled by the worthless imitations we had provided. Then the boxes were again securely closed; and to look at them no one would suspect the important changes which had taken place within.

The Emperor’s Cigars once out of their two thousand boxes were carefully repacked in certain zinc-lined barrels, and reshipped as “notions” to Havana to one of our folk who went ahead of the consignment to receive them. In due course, and in two thousand proper new boxes they again appeared in the port of New York; this time they paid their honest duty. Also, they had a proper consignment, came to no interrupting griefs; and being quickly disposed of, wrought out for us that sixty thousand dollar betterment of which I’ve spoken.

As corollary of this particular informality of The Emperor’s Cigars, there occurred an incident which while grievous to the victims, made no little fun for us; its relation here may entertain you, and because of its natural connection with the main story, will come properly enough. At set intervals, the government held an auction of all confiscated goods. At these markets to which the public was invited to appear and bid, the government asserted nothing, guaranteed nothing. In disposing of such gear as these cigars, no box was opened; no goods displayed. One saw nothing but the cover, heard nothing but the surmise of an auctioneer, and thereupon, if impulse urged, bid what he pleased for a pig in a poke.

Thus it came to pass that on the occasion when The Emperor’s Cigars were held aloft for bids, the garrulous lecturer employed in selling the collected plunder of three confiscation months, took up one of the two thousand boxes as a sample, and said:

“I offer for sale a lot of two thousand packages, of which the one I hold in my hand is a specimen. Each package is supposed to contain fifty cigars. What am I bid for the lot? What offer do I hear?”

That was the complete proffer as made by the government; for all that the bidding was briskly sharp. Those who had come to purchase were there for bargains not guarantees; moreover, there was the box; and could they not believe their experience? Each would-be bidder knew by the size and shape and character of the package that it was made for and should contain fifty cigars of the Emperor brand. Wherefore no one distrusted; the question of contents arose to no mind; and competition grew instant and close. Bid followed bid; five hundred dollars being the mark of each advance, as the noisy struggle between speculators for the lot’s ownership proceeded.

At last those celebrated marketeers, Grove and Filtord, received the lot—one hundred thousand of The Emperor’s Cigars—for forty-five thousand dollars. What thoughts may have come to them later, when they searched their bargain for its merits, I cannot say. Not one word of inquiry, condemnation or complaint came from Grove and Filtord. Whatever their discoveries, or whatever their deductions, they maintained a profound taciturnity. Probably they did not care to court the laughter of fellow dealers by disclosures of the trap into which they had so blindly bid their way. Surely, they must in its last chapters have been aware of the swindle! To have believed in the genuineness of the goods would have dissipated what remnant of good repute might still have clung to that last of the Napoleons who was their inventor, and justified the coming destruction of his throne and the birth of the republic which arose from its ruins. As I say, however, not one syllable of complaint came floating back from Grove and Filtord. They took their loss, and were dumb.

My own pocket was joyfully gorged with much fat advantage of this iniquity—for inside we were like whalers, each having a prearranged per cent, of what oil was made, no one working for himself alone—long prior to that bidding which so smote on Grove and Filtord. The ring had no money interest in the confiscation sales; those proceeds went all to government. We divided the profits of our own disposal of the right true Emperor’s Cigars on the occasion of their second appearance in port; and that business was ended and over and division done sundry weeks prior to the Grove and Filtord disaster.

That is the story of The Emperor’s Cigars; there came still one little incident, however, which was doubtless the seed of those apprehensions which soon drove me to quit the Customs. I had carried his double tithes to Betelnut Jack. This was no more the work of policy than right. The substitution of the bogus wares, the reshipment to Cuba of The Emperor’s Cigars, even the zinc-lined barrels, the repackage and second appearance and sale of our prizes, were one and all by direction of Betelnut Jack. He planned the campaign in each least particular. To him was the credit; and to him came the lion’s share, as, in good sooth! it should if there be a shadow of that honor among rogues whereof the proverb tells.

On the evening when I sought Betelnut Jack, we sat and chatted briefly of work at the wharfs. Not one word, mind you! escaped from either that might intimate aught of customs immorality. That would have been a gross breach of the etiquette understood by our flock of customs cormorants. No; Betelnut Jack and I confined discussion to transactions absolutely white; no other was so much as hinted at.

Then came Betelnut Jack’s proposal of his special Willow Run; he retired in quest of the demijohn; this was my cue to enrich “Josephus,” ready on the dwarf center table to receive the goods. My present to Betelnut Jack was five one-hundred-dol-lar bills.

Somewhat in haste, I took these from my pocket and opened “Josephus” to lay them between the pages. Any place would do; Betelnut Jack would know how to discover the rich bookmark. As I parted the book, my eye was arrested by a sentence. As I’ve asserted heretofore, I’m not superstitious; yet that casual sentence seemed alive and to spring upon me from out “Josephus” as a threat:

“And these men being thieves were destroyed by the King’s laws; and their people rended their garments, put on sackcloth, and throwing ashes on their heads went about the streets, crying out.”

That is what it said; and somehow it made my heart beat quick and little like a linnet’s heart. I put in my contribution and closed the book. But the words clung to me like ivy; I couldn’t free myself. In the end, they haunted me to my resignation; and while I remained long enough to share in the affair of the German Girl’s Diamonds, and in that of the Filibusterer, when the hand of discovery fell upon Lorns and Quin, and others of my one-time comrades, I was far away, facing innocent, if sometimes dangerous, problems on our western plains.

“With a profound respect for you,” observed the Jolly Doctor to the Sour Gentleman when that raconteur had ended, “and disavowing a least imputation personal to yourself, I must still say that I am amazed by the corruption which your tale discloses of things beyond our Customs doors. To be sure, you speak of years ago; and yet you leave one to wonder if the present be wholly free from taint.”

“It will be remarkable,” returned the Sour Gentleman, “when any arm of government is exerted with entire integrity and no purpose save public good, and every thought of private gain eliminated. The world never has been so virtuous, nor is it like to become so in your time or mine. Government and those offices which, like the works of a watch, are made to constitute it, are the production of politics, and politics, mind you, is nothing save the collected and harmonised selfishness of men. The fruit is seldom better than the tree, and when a source is foul the stream will wear a stain.” Here the Sour Gentleman sighed as though over the baseness of the human race.

“While there’s to be no doubt,” broke in the Red Nosed Gentleman, “concerning the corruption existing in politics and the offices and office holders bred therefrom, I am free to say that I’ve encountered as much blackness, and for myself I have been swindled oftener among merchants plying their reputable commerce of private scales and counters as in the administration of public affairs.”

The Red Nosed Gentleman here looked about with a challenging eye as one who would note if his observation is to meet with contradiction. Finding none, he relapsed into silence and burgundy.

“Speakin’ of politics,” said the Old Cattleman, who had listened to the others as though he found their discourse instructive, “it’s the one thing I’ve seen mighty little of. The only occasion on which I finds myse’f immersed in politics is doorin’ the brief sojourn I makes in Missouri, an’ when in common with all right-thinkin’ gents, I whirls in for Old Stewart.”

“Would you mind,” remarked the Jolly Doctor in a manner so amiable it left one no power to resist, “would you mind giving us a glimpse of that memorable campaign in which you bore doubtless no inconsiderable part? We should have time for it, before we retire.”

“Which the part I bears,” responded the Old Cattleman, “wouldn’t amount to the snappin’ of a cap. As to tellin’ you-all concernin’ said outburst of pop’lar enthoosiasm for Old Stewart, I’m plumb willin’ to go as far as you likes.” Drawing his chair a bit closer to the fire and seeing to it that a glass of Scotch was within the radius of his reach, the Old Cattleman began.