The Best American Mystery Stories of the 19th Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  He was driving noiselessly over the snow and slush in the street, with his thoughts bent only on the clock-face he wished so much to see, when a hoarse voice challenged him from the sidewalk. “Hey, you, stop there, hold up!” said the voice.

  Gallegher turned his head, and though he saw that the voice came from under a policeman’s helmet, his only answer was to hit his horse sharply over the head with his whip and to urge it into a gallop.

  This, on his part, was followed by a sharp, shrill whistle from the policeman. Another whistle answered it from a street-corner one block ahead of him. “Whoa,” said Gallegher, pulling on the reins. “There’s one too many of them,” he added, in apologetic explanation. The horse stopped, and stood, breathing heavily, with great clouds of steam rising from its flanks.

  “Why in hell didn’t you stop when I told you to?” demanded the voice, now close at the cab’s side.

  “I didn’t hear you,” returned Gallegher, sweetly. “But I heard you whistle, and I heard your partner whistle, and I thought maybe it was me you wanted to speak to, so I just stopped.”

  “You heard me well enough. Why aren’t your lights lit?” demanded the voice.

  “Should I have ’em lit?” asked Gallegher, bending over and regarding them with sudden interest.

  “You know you should, and if you don’t, you’ve no right to be driving that cab. I don’t believe you’re the regular driver, anyway. Where’d you get it?”

  “It ain’t my cab, of course,” said Gallegher, with an easy laugh. “It’s Luke McGovern’s. He left it outside Cronin’s while he went in to get a drink, and he took too much, and me father told me to drive it round to the stable for him. I’m Cronin’s son. McGovern ain’t in no condition to drive. You can see yourself how he’s been misusing the horse. He puts it up at Bachman’s livery stable, and I was just going around there now.”

  Gallegher’s knowledge of the local celebrities of the district confused the zealous officer of the peace. He surveyed the boy with a steady stare that would have distressed a less skillful liar, but Gallegher only shrugged his shoulders slightly, as if from the cold, and waited with apparent indifference to what the officer would say next.

  In reality his heart was beating heavily against his side, and he felt that if he was kept on a strain much longer he would give way and break down. A second snow-covered form emerged suddenly from the shadow of the houses.

  “What is it, Reeder?” it asked.

  “Oh, nothing much,” replied the first officer. “This kid hadn’t any lamps lit, so I called to him to stop and he didn’t do it, so I whistled to you. It’s all right, though. He’s just taking it round to Bachman’s. Go ahead,” he added, sulkily.

  “Get up!” chirped Gallegher. “Good night,” he added, over his shoulder.

  Gallegher gave a hysterical little gasp of relief as he trotted away from the two policemen, and poured bitter maledictions on their heads for two meddling fools as he went.

  “They might as well kill a man as scare him to death,” he said, with an attempt to get back to his customary flippancy. But the effort was somewhat pitiful, and he felt guiltily conscious that a salt, warm tear was creeping slowly down his face, and that a lump that would not keep down was rising in his throat.

  “’Tain’t no fair thing for the whole police force to keep worrying at a little boy like me,” he said, in shame-faced apology. “I’m not doing nothing wrong, and I’m half froze to death, and yet they keep a-nagging at me.”

  It was so cold that when the boy stamped his feet against the footboard to keep them warm, sharp pains shot up through his body, and when he beat his arms about his shoulders, as he had seen real cabmen do, the blood in his finger-tips tingled so acutely that he cried aloud with the pain.

  He had often been up that late before, but he had never felt so sleepy. It was as if someone was pressing a sponge heavy with chloroform near his face, and he could not fight off the drowsiness that lay hold of him.

  He saw, dimly hanging above his head, a round disk of light that seemed like a great moon, and which he finally guessed to be the clock-face for which he had been on the lookout. He had passed it before he realized this; but the fact stirred him into wakefulness again, and when his cab’s wheels slipped around the City Hall corner, he remembered to look up at the other big clock-face that keeps awake over the railroad station and measures out the night.

  He gave a gasp of consternation when he saw that it was half-past two, and that there was but ten minutes left to him. This, and the many electric lights and the sight of the familiar pile of buildings, startled him into a semi-consciousness of where he was and how great was the necessity for haste.

  He rose in his seat and called on the horse, and urged it into a reckless gallop over the slippery asphalt. He considered nothing else but speed, and looking neither to the left nor right dashed off down Broad Street into Chestnut, where his course lay straight away to the office, now only seven blocks distant.

  Gallegher never knew how it began, but he was suddenly assaulted by shouts on either side, his horse was thrown back on its haunches, and he found two men in cabmen’s livery hanging at its head, and patting its sides, and calling it by name. And the other cabmen who have their stand at the corner were swarming about the carriage, all of them talking and swearing at once, and gesticulating wildly with their whips.

  They said they knew the cab was McGovern’s, and they wanted to know where he was, and why he wasn’t on it; they wanted to know where Gallegher had stolen it, and why he had been such a fool as to drive it into the arms of its owner’s friends; they said that it was about time that a cab-driver could get off his box to take a drink without having his cab run away with, and some of them called loudly for a policeman to take the young thief in charge.

  Gallegher felt as if he had been suddenly dragged into consciousness out of a bad dream, and stood for a second like a half-awakened somnambulist.

  They had stopped the cab under an electric light, and its glare shone coldly down upon the trampled snow and the faces of the men around him.

  Gallegher bent forward, and lashed savagely at the horse with his whip.

  “Let me go,” he shouted, as he tugged impotently at the reins. “Let me go, I tell you. I haven’t stole no cab, and you’ve got no right to stop me. I only want to take it to the Press office,” he begged. “They’ll send it back to you all right. They’ll pay you for the trip. I’m not running away with it. The driver’s got the collar—he’s ’rested—and I’m only a-going to the Press office. Do you hear me?” he cried, his voice rising and breaking in a shriek of passion and disappointment. “I tell you to let go those reins. Let me go, or I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll kill you.” And leaning forward, the boy struck savagely with his long whip at the faces of the men about the horse’s head.

  Someone in the crowd reached up and caught him by the ankles, and with a quick jerk pulled him off the box, and threw him on to the street. But he was up on his knees in a moment, and caught at the man’s hand.

  “Don’t let them stop me, mister,” he cried, “please let me go. I didn’t steal the cab, sir. S’help me, I didn’t. I’m telling you the truth. Take me to the Press office, and they’ll prove it to you. They’ll pay you anything you ask ’em. It’s only such a little ways now, and I’ve come so far, sir. Please don’t let them stop me,” he sobbed, clasping the man about the knees. “For Heaven’s sake, mister, let me go!”

  The managing editor of the Press took up the india-rubber speaking-tube at his side, and answered, “Not yet” to an inquiry the night editor had already put to him five times within the last twenty minutes.

  Then he snapped the metal top of the tube impatiently, and went upstairs. As he passed the door of the local room, he noticed that the reporters had not gone home, but were sitting about on the tables and chairs, waiting. They looked up inquiringly as he passed, and the city editor asked, “Any news yet?” and the managing editor shook his head.
/>   The compositors were standing idle in the composing-room, and their foreman was talking with the night editor.

  “Well,” said that gentleman, tentatively.

  “Well,” returned the managing editor, “I don’t think we can wait; do you?”

  “It’s a half-hour after time now,” said the night editor, “and we’ll miss the suburban trains if we hold the paper back any longer. We can’t afford to wait for a purely hypothetical story. The chances are all against the fight’s having taken place or this Hade’s having been arrested.”

  “But if we’re beaten on it—” suggested the chief. “But I don’t think that is possible. If there were any story to print, Dwyer would have had it here before now.”

  The managing editor looked steadily down at the floor.

  “Very well,” he said, slowly, “we won’t wait any longer. Go ahead,” he added, turning to the foreman with a sigh of reluctance. The foreman whirled himself about, and began to give his orders; but the two editors still looked at each other doubtfully.

  As they stood so, there came a sudden shout and the sound of people running to and fro in the reportorial rooms below. There was the tramp of many footsteps on the stairs, and above the confusion they heard the voice of the city editor telling someone to “run to Madden’s and get some brandy, quick.”

  No one in the composing-room said anything; but those compositors who had started to go home began slipping off their overcoats, and every one stood with his eyes fixed on the door.

  It was kicked open from the outside, and in the doorway stood a cab-driver and the city editor, supporting between them a pitiful little figure of a boy, wet and miserable, and with the snow melting on his clothes and running in little pools to the floor. “Why, it’s Gallegher,” said the night editor, in a tone of the keenest disappointment.

  Gallegher shook himself free from his supporters, and took an unsteady step forward, his fingers fumbling stiffly with the buttons of his waistcoat.

  “Mr. Dwyer, sir,” he began faintly, with his eyes fixed fearfully on the managing editor, “he got arrested—and I couldn’t get here no sooner, ’cause they kept a-stopping me, and they took me cab from under me—but—” he pulled the notebook from his breast and held it out with its covers damp and limp from the rain—“but we got Hade, and here’s Mr. Dwyer’s copy.”

  And then he asked, with a queer note in his voice, partly of dread and partly of hope, “Am I in time, sir?”

  The managing editor took the book, and tossed it to the foreman, who ripped out its leaves and dealt them out to his men as rapidly as a gambler deals out cards.

  Then the managing editor stooped and picked Gallegher up in his arms, and, sitting down, began to unlace his wet and muddy shoes.

  Gallegher made a faint effort to resist this degradation of the managerial dignity; but his protest was a very feeble one, and his head fell back heavily on the managing editor’s shoulder.

  To Gallegher the incandescent lights began to whirl about in circles, and to burn in different colors; the faces of the reporters kneeling before him and chafing his hands and feet grew dim and unfamiliar, and the roar and rumble of the great presses in the basement sounded far away, like the murmur of the sea.

  And then the place and the circumstances of it came back to him again sharply and with sudden vividness.

  Gallegher looked up, with a faint smile, into the managing editor’s face. “You won’t turn me off for running away, will you?” he whispered.

  The managing editor did not answer immediately. His head was bent, and he was thinking, for some reason or other, of a little boy of his own, at home in bed. Then he said, quietly, “Not this time, Gallegher.”

  Gallegher’s head sank back comfortably on the older man’s shoulder, and he smiled comprehensively at the faces of the young men crowded around him. “You hadn’t ought to,” he said, with a touch of his old impudence, “’cause—I beat the town.”

  1892

  WILLIAM NORR

  ’Round the Opium Lamp

  Working as a newspaperman in New York, WILLIAM NORR made the Chinatown neighborhood his special area of expertise. He wrote true stories of life in what was then a small part of Manhattan (mainly centered on Mott Street, as it still is today in its vastly expanded section of lower Manhattan). He also tried his hand at fiction, but his sketches were filled with real-life characters whose stories were largely based on true incidents.

  To most Americans, the Chinese were so alien that they might as well have come from outer space. The tales in the little-known Norr’s only published book (and self-published, at that), the very rare Stories of Chinatown (1892), are typical of several other collections of stories about the Chinese living in pre–World War I America, mostly in New York’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns. That they are racist may be taken for granted, even if there may be no particular malevolence of spirit. The story collected here is included in this volume more as a representative of a type of fiction than for any exceptional literary qualities, though it moves along nicely without wasted words or pretension.

  Similar collections, such as Chester B. Fernald’s The Cat and the Cherub and Other Stories (1896), Helen F. Clark’s The Lady of the Lily Feet; and Other Tales of Chinatown (1900), and Dr. C. W. Doyle’s The Shadow of Quong Lung (1900), mainly feature portraits of sneaky and ignorant yellow-skinned male criminals and subjugated lotus-blossom-like girls. Perhaps because of Norr’s own frequenting of opium dens, as he writes in his introduction, his tales feature as many white people as they do Chinese, though they all tend to be treated as equals once they are “on the pipe.”

  “’Round the Opium Lamp” was first published in Stories of Chinatown: Sketches from Life in the Chinese Colony (New York: William Norr, 1892).

  ***

  YOU HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN how to handle the yen-hok, Jim,” said Frank the Kid, as he watched the cook deftly “chy” the pill above the tiny flame of the opium lamp. “By the way, how did they ever nail you? I never got the rights of that story. I was out in Denver and nearly dropped dead when Jimmy Hannon wrote me you’d gone away for fourteen years. There was some woman in it, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes,” said Jim, slowly, as he passed over the pipe, “there was a woman in it. But she wasn’t as much to blame as my own pigheadedness. If I’d treated her right I’d never done that long bit.”

  “That’s right,” said Jennie, as she playfully pulled the Kid’s ear. “Some people want to put the blame of everything on the women.”

  “And they call the turn nine times out of ten,” retorted the Kid. “But let’s hear the story, Jim. Nobody seems to have it quite straight. I know you went away wrong on some job of Pete Reagan’s, but where did the woman come in on the game?”

  “Well,” said Jim, “it’s all of ten years ago now. I was working for Barney Maguire at the time, and I tell you they were great old times. There’s as much difference between the sawdust business then and the game going on now as there is between night and day. We were in a basement on Sixth street, near Second avenue, and we’d run as high as ten suckers a day. It was great grafting, and the gang was in clover. Maguire was making so much money he didn’t know what to do with it. We were all up against the dope, and it was a great crowd that smoked at 4, 11 and 17 Mott street in those days. Almost any night you’d see Barney Maguire, Frank Maguire, his cousin; big George Butler, Tony Martin, Georgie Morton, Jimmie Hannon, Tommy Wilson, California Frank, California Jack, Dick Cronin, Billy Ferguson, Fitz the Kid, ‘Pretty Pinkie’ and lots of other good people.

  “Actors and actresses came down to Mott street then to go against the pipe, for there were no uptown joints. One night a young girl who played a small part in Stevens’s ‘Unknown’ came down. She was a nice little thing, white skin, reddish hair and big blue eyes. We cottoned to each other at once, and when the company went out on the road she wasn’t with it. We got along splendidly for a while. She got hitting the pipe heavily—I never see a woman, or man ei
ther, for that matter, take to the dope the way she did. She was at it day and night. She’d be down in Sing’s at 17 Mott street every afternoon. I’d meet her there at night and we’d never go home till daylight.

  “After some time I noticed that whenever I’d get to Sing’s I’d find Ida—that was her name—smoking with Georgie Appo. You know him, don’t you, a Chinese half-breed, son of Quimbo Appo, the Chinese murderer there was so much fuss over some fifteen years ago? Well, Georgie was a petty-larceny grafter and I had no use for him. I didn’t like him to be smoking with Ida, but didn’t think he was enough account to fuss about. But pretty soon the gang got kidding me on the steady company Ida was keeping. I didn’t believe Ida would do me dirt, especially with a Chink, but the jollying got me off and one morning when we got home I said to Ida:

  “‘Georgie Appo is no friend of mine, Ida, and I’d sooner you’d smoke with any of the other boys when I’m not around.’

  “Well, like all red-headed girls, she had a devil of a temper, and she just ripped out:

  “‘But I prefer to smoke with him.’

  “I was only a kid in those days and knew nothing about women or handling them, and her answer just set me wild. So I said: