I knew Dobbs for six months! Day after day I saw him come at three
o’clock in the morning. I saw his pale face, and that coat so audacious
in its fineness, go to the press-room, fold his papers, and hurry out
into the weather. One night I stopped him.
“Dobbs,” says I, “how much do you make a week?”
“I average five dollars and twenty cents, sir. I have twenty-seven
regular customers. I get the paper at fifteen cents a week from you, and
sell it to them at twenty-five cents. I make two dollars and seventy
cents off of them, and then I sell about twenty-five extra papers a
morning.”
“What do you do with your money?”
“It takes nearly all of it to support me and mother.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that you and your mother live on five dollars
and twenty cents a week?”
“Yes, sir, we do, and pay five dollars a month rent out of that. We live
pretty well, too,” with a smile, possibly induced by the vision of some
of those luxuries which were included under the head of “living pretty
well.” I was crushed!
_Five dollars and twenty-five cents a week!_ The sum which I waste per
week upon cigars. The paltry amount which I pay almost any night at the
theater. The sum that I spend any night I may chance to strike a
half-dozen boon companions. This sum, so contemptible to me—wasted so
lightly—I find to be the sum total of the income of a whole family—the
whole support of two human beings.
I left Dobbs, humiliated and crushed. I pulled my hat over my eyes,
strolled down to Mercer’s, and bought a twenty-five cent cigar and sat
down to think over my duty in the premises.
* * * * *
... One morning the book-keeper of the _Herald_, to whom my admiration
for Dobbs was well known (I having frequently delivered glowing lectures
upon his character from the mailing table to an audience of carriers,
clerks, and printers), approached me and with a devilish smack of joy in
his voice, says:
“I am afraid your man Dobbs is a fraud. Some time ago he persuaded the
clerk to give him credit on papers. He ran up a bill of about seven
dollars, and then melted from our view. We have not seen or heard of him
since—expect he’s gone to trading with the _Constitution_ now, to bilk
them out of a bill.”
This looked bad—but somehow or other I still had a firm faith in my
hero. God had written “honesty” too plain in his face for my confidence
in him to be shaken. I knew that if he had sinned or deceived, that it
was starvation or despair that had driven him to it, and I forgave him
even before I knew he was guilty....
* * * * *
About a week after this happened, a bombazine female—one of those
melancholy women that occasionally arise like some Banquo’s ghost in my
pathway, and always, I scarce know why, put remorse to twitching at my
heart-strings—came into my sanctum and asked for me.
“I am the mother,” says she, in a voice which sorrow (or snuff) had
filled with tears and quavers—“of Mr. Dobbs, a young man who used to buy
papers from you. He left owing you a little, and asked me to see you
about it.”
“Left? Where has he gone?”
“To heaven, I hope, sir! He is dead!”
“Dead?”