CHAPTER XIX

THROUGH THE WOMAN'S EYES

Matthews knew nothing and suspected nothing about the worst part of the plot against him until Albert's lawyer, Mr. Truesdale, nearly four years later, was called upon to testify in the suit Matthews brought for damages against the Vacuum people. This suit was to recover from them for having enticed Albert away, and having persecuted Matthews with false and malicious suits; but Truesdale's evidence at once revealed that there had been a deeper damnation still in the conspiracy against him. Mr. Matthews, one day on the street in Buffalo, ran across Albert, who had just come back from California.

"No man ever used another meaner than I have you," said the now repentant man to him, volunteering all the information he had, and agreeing to testify if called on. This revelation made the farmer-refiner a reformer. This was the public's business. If such things could be plotted and done with impunity by one man against another, there was an end forthwith of every liberty the republic boasted. Especially menacing was such a conspiracy when concerted by the rich fanatic of business against the poorer citizen to prevent the latter from disputing the claim that a great market was a private preserve, and that the right to trade in it is a privilege which "belongs to us."[470] Matthews could have used his discovery as an irresistible weapon to force his enemy to his knees, but he laid his evidence before the district attorney. This official presented it to the grand-jury, which found that the facts warranted indictments. When the first indictment was quashed on technical grounds a second grand-jury, sifting the facts, agreed with the first that the accused should be held to answer in the criminal courts. This was six years after the crime. The five persons indicted were the two former owners of the Vacuum, now the resident managers of it for the combination, and the three members of the oil trust, as the combination then called itself, who had bought the Vacuum for it, and had been elected by the trustees directors to manage it for them, and had so managed it even to the most picayune details. The case caught the ears of the world, not because crime was charged against men who had dazzled even the gold-filmed eyes of their epoch by the meteor-like flash of their flight from poverty into a larger share of "property"--the property of others--than any other group of millionaires had assimilated in an equal period; not for that, but because the charges of crime against these quickest-richest men were to be brought to trial. Members of the combination had been often accused; they had been indicted. This was the first time, as District Attorney Quinby said in his speech to the jury, that they had found a citizen honest enough and brave enough to stand up against them--the only one. "There is no man," he said, "so respected to-day in Buffalo as he for the method he has used to bring these men to justice." He succeeded in doing alone what the united producers of the oil regions failed to do, although their resources were infinitely greater. The people of the entire oil country failed utterly to do so much as get the members of the oil combination, when indicted for conspiracy in 1879, to come into court to be tried. All its principal men were indicted--the president, the vice-president, the secretary, the cashier, and others. They could not even be got to give bail. One of them had said when the indictments were found, that the case would never be tried, and it never has been. The Governor would not move to have those of the accused who were non-residents extradited, as he would have done, does daily, in the case of poor men, and the courts so tangled up the questions of procedure that the people withdrew, and left the indictments, as they remain to this day, on file in the Clarion County court, swinging like the body of some martyr on a road-side gibbet in the pagan days, polluting the air and mocking justice.[471]

That the trust was thoroughly alarmed, and saw the necessity of rallying all its resources to save itself, was apparent from the formidable display with which it appeared in the court-room. Present with the five defendants, as if also on trial--a solid phalanx--were its president, the vice-president, the manager of its pipe-line system, the principal representatives of the trust in Buffalo, and many others. Their regular attorney of New York was present with two of the leading lawyers of Buffalo. Besides these there was a distinguished man from Rochester, reputed the ablest lawyer in western New York, whose voice is often heard in the Supreme Court at Washington. He had two important members of the Rochester bar as assistants, one of them in the summing up unmercifully scored by the District Attorney for fixing witnesses; and, not least, a well-known United States District Attorney, who made the convention speeches by which a distinguished citizen of Buffalo was nominated, successively and successfully, for Sheriff, Mayor, Governor, and President. The defendants come here, said the people's attorney, with the best legal talent the country affords, the best the profession can furnish; for the trust--"they are practically the defendants in this action--with its great wealth, has the choice of legal talent." Other eminent lawyers were also consulted, but were not present. Never was a weak defence made the most of with more skill than these gentlemen exhibited upon the trial.... But great as was the ability of the defence, Mr. George T. Quinby, the District Attorney, and his assistant, William L. Marcy, proved a match for them. Every political and moneyed influence that could be brought to bear was used to mislead the District Attorney, but all to no purpose. The jury could see that the complainant, Charles B. Matthews, did not get the indictment to sell out, otherwise he would have sold it out and not have insisted upon a trial. The fact that the case was on trial, at a cost of many thousands of dollars to the defendants, was conclusive upon that point. An emissary, trying to get Matthews to call off the District Attorney and to hush up this criminal prosecution, said the oil trust could "give him anything, even to being governor of a Western territory."[472] "You will have a chance," Matthews told the District Attorney, "to line the street from your house to the City Hall with gold bricks." But this public prosecutor had no price. He grasped the full scope of this extraordinary case, which involved not only a crime against persons and against the people, but against that true commerce of reciprocal and equal service on which alone the new civilization of humanity can rest.

The room in the Buffalo court-house, where the case was being heard, was bright with the sunshine of a May day, putting out the shadows of indictments and verdicts lurking in corners and pigeon-holes. Although it was a criminal case, the on-looker saw, strange as it seemed, that whatever strain there was in the situation appeared to be felt least by the accused, and most by the public and the jury. The nearer the eyes of the on-looker travelled towards the prisoners, the lighter and brighter was the scene. Close to the accused sat a bench full of notables, evidently friends lending moral support. That the bench was occupied by men of importance was evident. They were supported by platoons of eminent counsel and detectives. Only the judge betrayed no consciousness of the presence of the herd of millionaires. The whisperings and pointings and namings by one spectator to another showed that the people's curiosity was greatly excited by the sight of the richest men in the country, if not in the world, with attendant millionaire esquires in or about the dock of a criminal court. On this particular day the notables and their suite had come in specially good-humor. Nods of kindly recognition went about and smiles rippled everywhere as, settled into their seats, they listened to the recital by the witnesses. It had been as good as a play to hear the working-man, Albert, tell on the stand how he had been bribed and threatened with ruin until he yielded to the suggestion that he should "bust up" the works of his friends, partners, and employers, and run away. There had been nothing funny to Albert in those threats: "We will ruin you," "We will crush you," "You will lose what little you have got left."[473]

"Then the compensation you got was $300 and the pleasure of selling out your friends?" Albert was asked by one of the great lawyers.[474] Albert did not smile, but "they seemed to enjoy hugely," reported the press, "the idea that men could be bought so cheap." The eminent counsel of the prisoners took the cue from their clients, and treated the proceedings as a farce. When the State's Attorney was questioning his witnesses, they objected to his questions with laughs and sneers until he became indignant, and asked, with considerable emphasis, to have the joke explained to him--a need the jury also felt, as their verdict showed. When the Boston agent of the trust told that his instructions from headquarters were that if there was to be any selling at a loss to let the new competitor have the loss,[475] they all laughed again.

So all the morning there had been fine sport in the court-room, and the good-humor had risen higher with every fresh incident in the entertainment until Albert's wife took her place in the witness-box. She, too, raised a laugh, but it was not she who laughed. Serious enough she was when taking her place on the witness-stand. She had to face these gentlemen, before whose hundreds of millions her husband's little venture had withered, but, as she herself afterwards said: "I wasn't afraid of them, but I was nervous. But as soon as I got talking I didn't care anything for them, although they all sat there in front, in a row, looking straight at me."

The wife's story to the jury showed how such an adventure appeared when looked at and experienced from the woman's stand-point--the home-maker's and the home-keeper's--which the smiling row before her were as little able to grasp as the participants in a pigeon-shooting match to look upon that vision of flames, demons, and death-dealing thunder from the point of view of the hapless birds. A bright-faced, brown-eyed, pleasant-looking woman, as she took the stand she looked what she was--an artisan's honest wife. "My husband," she said, "had been employed in the Vacuum oil works at Rochester thirteen or fourteen years, and we had accumulated some property--mortgages and money and real estate. We moved to Buffalo, April 5, 1881, where he was superintending the building of the Buffalo works."[476] After Albert had yielded to the threats and the temptation, and had fixed the stills and the fires for an explosion, he fled without a word to his wife or his associates, hid, under an assumed name, in Boston, and then travelled over the continent for a year--from Buffalo to Boston, to Rochester, to San Francisco.

"When you left Buffalo did you leave any word with Matthews where you were going?"

"No, sir."

"Or your wife?"

"No, sir."

While the wife was in Buffalo wondering what had become of her husband, he was in New York with his venerable ex-employer, getting lessons like the following in the secrets of building up a great commercial enterprise:

"The best thing you can do, Albert," said the latter, "is to go and write a telegram, and tell your wife to go back to Rochester."

"You'd better write it; I am a poor writer," said Albert.

"No," he said; "I do not want to appear in this case at all. Write it so," he continued, "that she can move on the Fourth of July, and they can't attach her things."[477]

The first word she got from her husband was this telegram to move between two days, and back to Rochester the dutiful woman packed herself and her things.

"It was two or three weeks before I heard from him direct or knew just where he was," she said.

"I asked Charles"--one of the two managers--"how Al was, and he said Al was all right."

"Would he tell you where he was?" the State's Attorney asked.

"No, sir; when I wrote to my husband I left the direction blank, and gave the letter to Charley. I got an answer through Charley."[478]

For three weeks they would not let her know where her husband was. "Think of that," said the District Attorney. "She had to go and take her poor little letter to her husband, thinking, perhaps, if he was away from her tender care he might get to drinking, because he does drink some; but when with his wife they lived year in and year out without his tasting a drop; ... afraid that he might get to drinking, and that she could not watch over him.... It was a cruel thing to do."

"C. told me to go to the real-estate agents," Albert's wife continued, "and try to sell our property and get it into money. He made out a list of real-estate agents from the city directory. I guess that is all he did about assisting me in the sale of the property."

"I asked C. if my husband could not come home from Boston. I was sick. He said 'Yes.' Al came home and stayed a week or two. Then he went back to Boston. C. told me they did not want the Buffalo company to know where Al was."[479]

Albert was a man infirm under temptation. The employer knew, by fourteen years' acquaintance, the weakness this man had acquired in his service in the army. He gave him idleness, money, temptation, and an assumed name to go to the devil with, if that agent of the trust was to be found in Boston.

"You want to take good care of Al," said the good old man to his clerk in Boston, "and not let him get homesick. If he wants any money, let him have it." Albert travelled the broad way made smooth for him.

"Of course I never went around with him," said the clerk, in a deposition; "a porter that I had was the party that went around with him in the evening. I would hear what was going on, and I could judge about the size of Al's head when he came around in the morning."

With all Albert's faults he kept one dignity to the end which makes him tower above his seducers--the dignity of the laborer. A life's discipline in daily toil had made his whole fibre too honest to enjoy idleness, even at the rate of $1500 a year. He was free to come and go amid the gaudy joys of a great city, as irresponsible under the assumed name given him as if he wore the ring of Gyges. He had money for the asking, and boon companions. But the habit of a lifetime of honest, hard manual work was too deeply ingrained into the very substance of his nature for him to become a cheap American Faust, revelling in a pinchbeck paradise. This simple son of poverty had all his life handled only real things, and had at every point had the mind's native wantonness and riot checked by the hard surface which had calloused his hands, and the outer air which had cooled him as he worked. His were dreams of honest rest earned by honest work, and of family joys. The self-indulgence that was revealed by the "size of his head in the morning" was an animal exuberance that, as the result showed, did but stain the "rose-mesh of his flesh," and went no deeper. Albert could not stand the idleness of his Boston life. He went back to Rochester.

"I want something to do."

"What brings you here?" said his employer. "Go back."

After hanging around the office in Boston a few weeks longer, the workman's nature reasserted itself again. He went back again to Rochester. "I want something to do." "We have not got anything for you to do just now," he was told. "You are all right."[480]

Months of idleness were interrupted only by odd jobs, like superintending the digging of a ditch or the sinking of a salt-well. Time and again, though he was drawing his pay of $125 a month, he went, as he told the story in court, to repeat the plea for "something to do." Finally, the elder of the managers, who was in California, sent for him. He was to be made "an independent man," the new promise ran, but really, as the sequel showed, was, if possible, to be kept out of the way of too inquisitive juries and prosecuting attorneys. The wife, treated as a mere pawn in the game, protested vehemently. "I went down to the Vacuum Oil Company's office, and asked C. to give Al something else to do. I didn't want him to go to California. He said that there was not anything that he knew that he could do."

"I don't want Al to go. I won't go. Give him something else to do."

"I have nothing else."[481]

She had to yield, and her husband left her to go to California. His employer persuaded Albert to buy a piece of land in California. "He seemed to be very anxious to locate me there."[482] Albert sent to his wife for the money, but the shrewd little woman sent only half. "I thought I would let him pay it out of his pay." With the same good sense the wife had not sold all the property when sent out alone among the real-estate men. "I did not sell the real estate," she said; "I thought there was too much expense."[483] She was not with her husband when the rupture came in California. The first news the anxious wife had of a change in her husband's affairs was when "Charley" came to her, as she was sitting one summer evening on the porch of a neighbor's house, and told her "Al" had quit them. "I do not know what to make of it," he continued: "I think he must be crazy or something."[484]

It was not until his return that she learned the details of the painful experience he had been through. When it was heard that Albert, upon his return from California, had made restitution as far as he was able, by telling what he knew to the authorities, to aid them in bringing the principals in the crime to justice, there was consternation in the trust. One of its detectives had been captain of the company Albert was in during the Civil War. The captain now presented himself before Albert as he went to his work in Corry, Pennsylvania, where he had gone after his return from California, and became sociable rapidly. He had great plans for Albert, and came to the house to discuss them confidentially. Albert and his wife had been simple folks to start with, but they had learned a thing or two by this time. The captain's desire for confidential talk with his old comrade was so intense that it would have been rude in Albert's wife to thwart it. She packed off her daughter on an errand, and announced that she had a call up the street, and would leave them to themselves; but she did not add, as she might have done, that during her absence she would be represented by the Chief of Police, whose appetite for confidential communications was as keen as the captain's, but whose retiring disposition kept him in the dark seclusion of an adjoining room, with his ear to the crack of the door.

"Wouldn't Albert like to go to Russia?" the captain asked his dear friend the private, whose existence he had never personally recognized when they were so close together during the Civil War. "If the Court will allow me to show by this witness," said the prosecuting attorney, "that the captain came there as a detective for the oil trust, and made a proposition, after the indictments were found, to Albert to flee the country, and go with him to Russia." One of the army of trust lawyers was instantly on his feet with "I object." The judge sustained him, and the testimony was shut out.

Albert's wife kept close to his side, and held him steady. No, Albert did not care to go to Russia. Advertisements of an alum-mine in Corry then began to appear in newspapers where Albert's attention could be called to them. By a lucky chance the captain happened to know the capitalists whose boundless powers of enterprise could find full outlet only by developing the hitherto unsuspected resources of Corry for supplying the nations of the earth with alum. By a joyful coincidence, these capitalists wanted for superintendent of their bottomless alum-mines just such a man as the captain knew his dear Albert to be. Would Albert like to go to Italy to learn the true science of alum manufacture, and to show the effete monarchies how an American could disembowel the earth of its alum? Salary, $5000 and expenses. No, Albert had no unslaked ambition to go to Italy as superintendent of mines of alum, or green cheese, or any other lunar commodity.

At least, Albert would take a drink? That poor Albert would do; and when he failed to come home at night his wife went up and down the streets seeking him. "A persistent effort had been made" by the trust, Mr. Matthews testified, "to get Albert out of the country. I was afraid they would get him away, as he might not be used in this case. Men had been sent there to get him drunk, and had debauched him."[485] Money was potent enough to persuade lawyers to make it a part of their professional duty to help in this. One of the trust's lawyers sat with Albert and its detective in the stall of a cheap saloon, and plied him with liquor to get from him some letters of Matthews' they wanted. "There they sat," said the keeper of the saloon; " ... they got what they called for, probably.... I couldn't tell how many drinks they got into Albert on that occasion; I think they drank there."[486]

While this courtship was in progress with Albert in Pennsylvania, wires were being pulled to get him indicted in New York. The grand-jury of Rochester was asked to indict him for receiving stolen property in a watch trade he had made seven years before. This would have ruined him as a witness in the forthcoming criminal case against the members of the oil trust, but the grand-jury decided that there was no evidence on which to indict. When Adam Cleber, a stolid-looking German laborer, who worked in the same place with Albert in Corry, took the stand for the State at the close, an eager excitement filled the court-room. The State's Attorney was known to have his darkest sensation still in reserve. What it was he would not, of course, disclose in advance, but those hardly less familiar than he with the evidence hinted that the fertile genius of the captain, having exhausted itself in the ideas of the trips to Russia and Italy, had fallen back upon the genius of his superiors, and had arranged to have Albert go a-hunting, and get a "bust-up" as much as possible like the one he had been induced to attempt upon his employers and partners.

"Did the captain tell you what he wanted you to do to Albert?" Cleber was asked.

"Yes--" That was as far as Cleber got.

"I object!" screamed one of the lawyers.

"I propose to show that the captain made a request of this witness in regard to what he should do to Albert, and what he should come and swear to about Albert, there being no truth in the matter he wanted Cleber to swear to," the State's Attorney urged to the Court. The judge took the matter home for consideration over-night, and announced in the morning that he would not admit the evidence. It was acknowledged by one of the lawyers for the members of the trust on trial that he had employed the captain to get evidence for them; but the judge, instead of admitting Cleber's testimony, and leaving the question of its value to be settled by the jury, excluded it.

In his closing speech District Attorney Quinby said: "Why, in Heaven's name, my friends, didn't you place the captain on this witness-stand? He would have been a feast for you and a feast for me. His ways have been curious and sinuous, his methods have been peculiar and corrupting, and they did not dare to put him on the stand because if they did he would have left it to go to prison. That is the reason. They know it."

The brave and steadfast woman told her part of this story on the witness-stand. Her home had been broken up again and again. As she herself said afterwards: "I had to live with my carpets packed, and moved around like a gypsy." Her husband had been tempted to commit a crime which compelled him to lead the life of a fugitive. He had been spirited away and secreted; she had not been allowed to know where he was, and could communicate with him only through a third person; they had moved around, in her expressive phrase, until they had moved into two rooms; the savings of fifteen years' hard work were all gone, and the independent business, in which her husband had just got his footing, swept away. He and she faced the world with no other assets than their child and the palms of their hard-working hands.

"Well, it's taken all we had," she says; "we've lost it all, but I'd rather it would be so than to have the money they have, and go about hiding and sneaking. I'd like money, but not so well as that. When I said to 'Charley,' 'I shall have to sell all my furniture'--'Oh, that's nothing.' And when I told him it had cost us $100 to pay the expenses of selling real estate--'That isn't much.' It wasn't much to them, but it was to us, who had made every dollar by hard work. Well, we'll have to do without the money, and just live along by honest work. We can live that way. We have had all this trouble and lost our money, and haven't made money enough to buy a calico dress."

All the good that had come of this loss of savings and home and honor had gone to those at the bar of justice and their associates sitting in the tickled row before her. On the cross-examination, which was to crush the witness and her damaging testimony, the distinguished counsel, not content with all the suffering and loss already inflicted on this wife, tried to humiliate her still further, but the woman's wit of truth was too much for the lawyer's wit of wile.

"Don't you recollect," the lawyer asked, "that you went to the house of the manager of the Vacuum, and that you saw him in the parlor, and that you asked him to take your husband back?"

"I never asked him to take my husband back."

"Then you did not ask him at the time and place I spoke of?"

"I never asked him anywhere to take him back."

"Don't you recollect upon that occasion being considerably affected, and asking him to take your husband back, and his speaking of the way in which he had left the company, which he characterized as shameful, and that you cried--shed tears?"

"I never asked him to take him back. I recollect going there. I recollect I felt bad, because I was talked to so much about it. I had reason to feel bad. I am trying to tell the truth as near as I can."

"Then what was the occasion of your bad feeling?"

"It was because I thought we were going to lose everything, and would not have nothing left. That is what I felt bad for--was shedding tears for, if I did. I don't know as I did."[487]

Then came the laugh. From millionaire to lesser millionaire went the enlarging laugh. The mighty cortege of the retained ex-judges, famous constitutional and criminal lawyers, detectives, camp-followers laughed. It was the laugh of hundreds of millions, and it clinked and tinkled and rang. As if every mouth were a bagful of gold, and as if every bag had burst, the golden notes of mirth filled the air, and struck the ceiling, and rolled over the floor, rebounded and fell and rose in mellow chimes of sound, and the golden rain dripped everywhere. Millions on millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of the coin of the republic, and in every coin a cackle.

"Yes, they all laughed at me," the little woman told her friends; "it looked like such a great joke to them. Perhaps I did not tell it very well, but I told the truth."

In closing the case the State's Attorney said to the jury: "A sorrow was placed on that woman's heart that can never be removed. One of the pathetic things in this case was that when this woman was on the stand, telling her little story, how they were afraid they might lose the few thousand dollars they had saved, the $6000 or $7000 they had been struggling for for fifteen years, these New York gentlemen with their millions laughed in her face at the idea of her being sorry to lose the pittance of $6000 or $7000. It was the only time in the case, really, I felt that these gentlemen were outraging common decency."[488]

Some time after the trial was over, and sentence passed and satisfied, these men sent for Albert to come to Rochester. He went with witnesses. There in the office of a leading lawyer he was tempted with desperate propositions to do something or say something that would break the force with which these disclosures must act on public opinion. "They need not think," he replied, "that they can get me to make a false oath to let them out of a hole. I would not do it for all the combined wealth of the trust. When my wife was on the stand they laughed her in the face when she told about losing all we had. Do you suppose any man with a particle of American blood could have any love for them? I think as much of my wife and daughter as any of them of theirs, and I will do nothing to disgrace them." This hard-working and hard-living laborer and his wife had, by thirteen or fourteen years of toil and stinting, saved $6000. The laughers had in the same time saved about $300,000,000, and somebody else had done all the work. The poor man and his wife had been afraid that the $300,000,000 would devour the $6000. It said it would, and it had. Shall not they laugh who win?