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 th............