When the war was done and the battle flags of that confederacy which had been my sweetheart were rolled tight to their staves and laid away in mournful, dusty corners to moulder and be forgot, I cut those buttons and gold ends of braid from my uniform, which told of me as a once captain of rebels, and turned my face towards New York. I was twenty-one at the time; my majority arrived on the day when Lee piled his arms and surrendered to Grant at Appomatox. A captain at twenty-one? That was not strange, my friends, in a time when boys of twenty-two were wearing the wreath of a brigadier. The war was fought by boys, not men;—like every other war. Ah! I won my rank fairly, saber in fist; so they all said.
Those were great days. I was with O’Ferrell. There are one hundred miles in the Shenandoah, and backwards and forwards I’ve fought on its every foot. Towards the last, each day we fought, though both armies could see the end. We, for our side, fought with the wrath of despair; the Federals, with the glow of triumph in plain sight. Each day we fought; for if we did not go riding down the valley hunting Sheridan, the sun was never over-high when he rode up the valley hunting us. Those were brave days! We fought twice after the war was done. Yes, we knew of Richmond’s fall and that the end was come. But what then? There was the eager foe; there were we, sullen and ripe and hot with hate. Why should we not fight? So it befell that I heard those gay last bugles that called down the last grim charge; so it came that I, with my comrades, made the last gray line of battle for a cause already lost, and fought round the last standards of a confederacy already dead. Those were, indeed, good days—those last scenes were filled with the best and bravest of either side.
No; I neither regret nor repent the rebellion; nor do I grieve for rebellion’s failure. All’s well that well ends, and that carnage left us the better for it. For myself, I came honestly by my sentiments of the South. I was born in Virginia, of Virginians. One of my youthful recollections is how John Brown struck his blow at Harper’s Ferry; how Governor Wise called out that company of militia of which I was a member; and how, as we stood in the lamp-lighted Richmond streets that night, waiting to take the road for Harper’s Ferry, an old grotesque farmerish figure rushed excitedly into our midst. How we laughed at the belligerent agriculturist! No, he was no farmer; he was Wilkes Booth who, with the first whisper of the news, had come hot foot from the stage of Ford’s Theater in his costume of that night to have his part with us. But all these be other stories, and I started to tell, not of the war nor of days to precede it, but about that small crash in tobacco wherein I had disastrous part.
When I arrived in New York my hopes were high, as youth’s hopes commonly are. But, however high my hope, my pocket was light and my prospects nothing. Never will I forget how the mere sensation of the great city acted on me like a stimulant. The crowd and the breezy rush of things were as wine. Then again, to transplant a man means ever a multiplication of spirit. It was so with me; the world and the hour and I were all new together, and never have I felt more fervor of enterprise than came to me those earliest New York days. But still, I must plan and do some practical thing, for my dollars, like the hairs of my head, were numbered.
It was my seventh New York morning. As I sat in the café of the Astor House, my eye was caught by a news paragraph. The Internal Revenue law, with its tax of forty cents a pound on tobacco, had gained a construction, and the department’s reading of the law at once claimed my hungriest interest. No tobacco grown prior to the crop of ’66 was to be affected by the tax; that was the decision.
Aside from my saber-trade as a cavalryman, tobacco was that thing whereof I exhaustively knew. I was a tobacco adept from the hour when the seed went into the ground, down to the perfumed moment when the perfect leaf exhaled in smoke. Moreover, I was aware of a trade matter in the nature of a trade secret, which might be made of richest import.
During those five red years of war, throughout the tobacco regions of the south, planting and harvesting, though crippled, had still gone forward. The fires of battle and the moving lines of troops had only streaked those regions; they never wholly covered or consumed them. And wherever peace prevailed, the growing of tobacco went on. The harvests had been stored; there was no market—no method of getting the tobacco out. To be brief, as I read the internal revenue decision above quoted, on that Astor House morning, I knew that scattered up and down Virginia and throughout the rest of the kindom of tobacco, the crops of full five years were lying housed, mouldy and mildewed, for the most part, and therefore cheap to whoever came with money in his hands. For an hour I sat over my coffee and made a plan.
There was a gentleman, an old college friend of my father. He was rich, avoided business and cared only for books. I had made myself known to him on the day of my arrival; he had asked me, over a glass of wine, to let him hear from me as time and my destinies took unto themselves direction. For my tobacco plan I must have money; and I could think of no one save my father’s friend of the books.
When I was shown into the old gentleman’s library, I found him deeply held with Moore’s Life of Byron. As he greeted me, he kept the volume in his left hand with finger shut in the page. Evidently he trusted that I would not remain long and that he might soon return to his reading.
The situation chilled me; I began my story with slight belief that its end would be fortunate. I exposed my tobacco knowledge, laid bare my scheme of trade, and craved the loan of five thousand dollars on the personal security—not at all commercial—of an optimist of twenty-one, whose only employment had been certain boot-and-saddle efforts to overthrow the nation. I say, I had scant hope of obtaining the aid I quested. I suffered disappointment. I was dealing with a gentleman who, however much he might grudge me a few moments taken from Byron, was willing enough to help me with money. In truth, he seemed relieved when he had heard me through; and he at once signed a check with a fine flourish, and I came from his benevolent presence equipped for those tobacco experiments I contemplated.
It is not required that I go with filmy detail into a re-count of my enterprise. I began safely and quietly; with my profits I extended myself; and at the end of eighteen months, I had so pushed affairs that I was on the highway to wealth and the firm station of a millionaire.
I had personally and through my agents bought up those five entire war-crops of tobacco. Most of it was still in Virginia and the south, due to my order; much of it had been already brought to New York. By the simple process of steaming and vaporizing, I removed each trace of mould and mildew, and under my skillful methods that war tobacco emerged upon the market almost as sweet and hale as the best of our domestic stock; and what was vastly in its favor, its flavor was, if anything, a trifle mild.
In that day of leaf tobacco, the commodity was marketed in one-hundred-pound bales. My bales were made with ninety-two pounds of war tobacco, sweated free of any touch of mildew; and eight pounds of new tobacco, the latter on the outside for the sake of color and looks. Thus you may glimpse somewhat the advantage I had. Where, at forty cents a pound, the others paid on each bale of tobacco a revenue charge of forty dollars, I, with only eight pounds of new tobacco, paid but three dollars and twenty cents. And I had cornered the exempted tobacco. Is it wonder I began to wax rich?
Often I look over my account books of those brilliant eighteen months. When I read that news item on the Astor House morning I’ve indicated, I had carefully modeled existence to a supporting basis of ten dollars a week. When eighteen months later there came the crash, I was permitting unto my dainty self a rate of personal expenditure of over thirty thousand dollars a year. I had apartments up-town; I was a member of the best clubs; I was each afternoon in the park with my carriage; incidentally I was languidly looking about among the Vere de Veres of the old Knickerbockers for that lady who, because of her superlative beauty and wit and modesty coupled with youth and station, was worthy to be my wife. Also, I recall at this period how I was conceitedly content with myself; how I gave way to warmest self-regard; pitied others as dullards and thriftless blunderers; and privily commended myself as a very Caesar of Commerce and the one among millions. Alas! “Pride goeth”—you have read the rest!
It was a bright October afternoon. My cometlike career had subsisted for something like a year and a half; and I, the comet, was growing in size and brilliancy as time fled by. My tobacco works proper were over towards the East River in a brick warehouse I had leased; to these, which were under the superintendence of a trusty and expert adherent whom I had brought north from Richmond, I seldom repaired. My offices—five rooms, fitted and furnished to the last limit of rosewood and Russia leather magnificence—were down-town.
On this particular autumn afternoon, as I went forth to my brougham for a roll to my apartments, the accountant placed in my hands a statement which I’d asked for and which with particular exactitude set forth my business standing. I remember it exceeding well. As I trundled up-town that golden afternoon, I glanced at those additions and subtractions which told my opulent story. Briefly, my liabilities were ninety thousand dollars; and I was rich in assets to a money value of three hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The ninety thousand was or would be owing on my tobacco contracts south, and held those tons on tons of stored, mildewed war tobacco, solid to my command. As I read the totals and reviewed the items, I would not have paid a penny of premium to insure my future. There it was in black and white. I knew what I had done; I knew what I could do. I was master of the tobacco situation for the next three years to come. By that time, I would have worked up the entire fragrant stock of leaf exempt from the tax; also by that time, I would count my personal fortune at a shadow over three millions. There was nothing surer beneath the sun. At twenty-six I would retire from trade and its troubles; life would lie at my toe like a kick-ball, and I would own both the wealth and the supple youth to pursue it into every nook and corner of pleasurable experience. Thus ran my smug reflections as I rolled northward along Fifth avenue to dress for dinner on that bright October day.
It was the next afternoon, and I had concluded a pleasant lunch in my private office when Mike, my personal and favorite henchman, announced a visitor. The caller desired to see me on a subject both important and urgent.
“Show him in!” I said.
There slouched into the room an awkward-seeming man of middle age; not poor, but roughly dressed. No one would have called him a fop; his clothes, far astern of the style, fitted vilely; while his head, never beautiful, was made uglier with a shock of rudely exuberant hair and a stubby beard like pig’s bristles. It was an hour when there still remained among us, savages who oiled their hair; this creature was one; and I remember how the collar of his rusty surtout shone like glass with the dripped grease.
My ill-favored visitor accepted the chair Mike placed for him and perched uneasily on its edge. When we were alone, I brought him and his business to instant bay. I was anxious to free myself of his presence. His bear’s grease and jaded appearance bred a distaste of him.
“What is it you want?” My tones were brittle and sharp.
The uncouth caller leered at me with a fashion of rancid leer—I suppose even a leer may have a flavor. Then he opened with obscure craft—vaguely, foggily. He wanted to purchase half my business. He would take an account of stock; give me exact money for one-half its value; besides, he would pay me a bonus of fifty thousand dollars.
If this unkempt barbarian had come squarely forth and told me his whole story; if, in short, I had known who he was and whom he came from, there would have grown no trouble. I would have gulped and swallowed the pill; we would have dealt; I’d have had a partner and been worth one and one-half million instead of three millions when my fortune was made. But he didn’t. He shuffled and hinted and leered, and said over and over again as he repeated his offer:
“You need a partner.”
But beyond this he did not go; and of this I could make nothing, and I felt nothing save a cumulative resentment that kept growing the larger the longer he stayed. I told him I desired none of his partnership. I told him this several divers times; and each time with added vigor and a rising voice. To the last he persistently and leeringly retorted his offer; always concluding, like another Cato, with his eternal Delenda est Carthago.
“You need a partner!”
Even my flatterers have never painted me as patient, and at twenty-three my pulse beat swift and hot. And it came to pass that on the heels of an acrid ten minutes of my visitor, I brought him bluntly up.
“Go!” I said. “I’ve heard all I care to hear. Go; or I’ll have you shown the door!”
It was of no avail; the besotted creature held his ground.
I touched a bell; the faithful Mike appeared. It took no more than a wave of the hand; Mike had studied me and knew my moods. At once he fell upon the invader and threw him down stairs with all imaginable spirit.
Thereupon I breathed with vast relief, had the windows lifted because of bear’s grease that tainted the air, and conferred on the valorous Celt a reward of two dollars.
Who was this ill-combed, unctuous, oily, cloudy, would-be partner? He was but a messenger; two months before he had resigned a desk in the Washington Treasury—for appearances only—to come to me and make the proffer. After Mike cast him forth, he brushed the dust from his knees and returned to Washington and had his treasury desk again. He was a mere go-between. The one he stood for and whose plans he sought to transact was a high official of revenue. This latter personage, of whose plotting identity back in the shadows I became aware only when it was too late, noting my tobacco operations and their profits and hawk-hungry for a share, had sent me the offer of partnership. I regret, for my sake as well as his own, that he did not pitch upon a more sagacious commissioner.
Now fell the bolt of destruction. The morning following Mike’s turgid exploits with my visitor, I was met in the office door by the manager. His face was white and his eyes seemed goggled and fixed as if their possessor had been planet-struck. I stared at him.
“Have you read the news?” he gasped.
“What news?”
“Have you not read of the last order?”
Over night—for my visitor, doubtless, wired his discomfiture—the Revenue Department had reversed its decision of two years before. The forty cents per pound of internal revenue would from that moment be demanded and enforced against every leaf of tobacco then or thereafter to become extant; and that, too, whether its planting and its reaping occurred inter arma or took place beneath the pinions of wide-spreading peace. The revenue office declared that its first ruling, exempting tobacco grown during the war, had been taken criminal advantage of; and that thereby the nation in its revenue rights had been sorely defeated and pillaged by certain able rogues—meaning me. Therefore, this new rule of revenue right and justice.
Now the story ends. Under these changed, severe conditions, when I was made to meet a tax of forty dollars where I’d paid less than a tithe of it before, I was helpless. I couldn’t, with my inferior tobacco, engage on even terms against the new tobacco and succeed. My strength had dwelt in my power to undersell. This power was departed away; my locks as a Sampson were shorn.
But why spin out the hideous story? My market was choked up; a cataract of creditors came upon me; my liabilities seemed to swell while my assets grew sear and shrunken. Under the shaking jolt of that last new revenue decision, my fortunes came tumbling like a castle of cards.
After three months, I dragged myself from beneath the ruin of my affairs and stood—rather totteringly—on my feet again. I was out of business. I counted up my treasure and found myself, debtless and unthreatened, master of some twenty thousand dollars.
And what then? Twenty thousand dollars is not so bad. It is not three millions; nor even half of three millions; but when all is said, twenty thousand is not so bad! I gave up my rich apartments, sold my horses, looked no more for a female Vere de Vere with intent her to espouse, and turned to smuggling. I had now a personal as well as a regional grudge against government. The revenue had cheated me; I would in revenge cheat the revenue. I became a smuggler. That, however, is a tale to tell another day.
“And now,” observed the Red Nosed Gentleman, dipping deeply into his burgundy, as if for courage, “I’ll even keep my promise. I’ll tell a story of superstition and omen; also how I turned in my infancy to cards as a road to wealth. Cards as a method to arrive by riches is neither splendid nor respectable, but I shall make no apologies. I give you the story of The Sign of The Three.”