Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 111, No. 4, June 12, 1937
Opposition Sheet
by Edward S. Williams
A courageous newspaper publisher bucks dirty politics and a band of terrorists.
Chapter I
The man in the baggy tweeds turned in at the Post Office, his mien casual, affable.
A battered hat, reduced to limp and flapping comfort by years and inclement weather, was pushed well back on his head. His teeth, when he smiled — and he was always smiling — were strong, regular, clamped on the bit of a scarred and ancient pipe. Raw-boned, angular, there was a hint of the scarecrow in Phineas Spear as he bent his long frame over a lock-drawer in the bottom row. But nobody laughed — or even smiled! He opened it, scooped up the half dozen letters therein and straightened.
“Gentlemen,” he announced genially, “good morning!”
There was a sticky silence.
Unruffled, the only apparent cause for that silence glanced through his mail. His eyes — smoky grey, whimsical — acquired an added touch of mild, good-humored cynicism. He glanced up finally at the cluster of men who watched him, not with open hostility, but with a guarded, stony coldness. Phineas Spear was new to Liberty — but it was not his newness that marked him. It was his new ideas that Liberty was finding it hard to swallow. No one answered his greeting. Phineas Spear smiled more broadly.
“Nevertheless,” he remarked, “it is a good morning.” And he went out with his peculiar, loose-jointed stride that was almost an ambling lope. Morning gossip in Liberty’s new Post Office was resumed, though not in customary vein.
“Is that him?” somebody asked. “The guy that runs the Blade now?”
“Yeah!” was the answer. “Runs it now is good! Way he’s started, he won’t last long. Flyin’ in Major Bardin’s face like he’s done — attackin’ the Courts — printin’ stuff that just as good as says Abel Parkes didn’t kill ol’ Senator Southard. I tell you men it ain’t American! This guy Spear’s no better than Abel Parkes himself — a damned Red — an’ somethin’ oughta be done about it.”
Another voice cut in, harsh, rasping, “Maybe — somethin’ will!”
There was a furtive silence. No one looked at anyone else. Then: “Seen the News-Herald this mornin’? Read what Major Bardin said?”
“Sure! The Major sorta rubbed this fella’s nose in it. The Blade used t’be a good, respectable newspaper, but... Well, the Major’ll straighten him out soon — or run him out!”
They agreed, and turned as one man to watch Spear cross the street and turn toward the dingy brick building that housed the offices of the Liberty Blade — the one that used to be a good, respectable newspaper. And at the corner they saw him stop to talk to a small, thin man who looked like a shabby child beside Phineas Spear’s slim height.
“Randall Pierson!” somebody said. “Wonder if he’s drunk yet. Birds of a feather, I guess!”
There was a guffaw.
But Randall Pierson wasn’t drunk — yet! In spite of the sickly sweet odor of gin that hovered about him in a palpable aura, Randall Pierson held his thin body erect, walked steadily. He looked old. His cheeks were hollow, ghastly pale and mottled with the interlaced, fine veins of an alcoholic. Randall Pierson, attorney at law, was nearer forty than the sixty his appearance indicated. Ill-kempt, needing a shave, there still lingered in the man the shattered remnants of breeding, intelligence not yet wholly consumed by liquor’s slow destruction. In his sober moments, Randall Pierson was still shrewd, still capable. He raised an almost transparent hand in greeting as Phineas Spear called out:
“Hi, Counselor!”
“Morning, Spear,” he smiled one-sidedly. “So you’re still among the living! Weren’t murdered in your sleep last night. I thought you might be after reading your editorial. It was fine, my boy, but wasted! Liberty is dead to such truthful blasts, even when they carry the punch you give them.”
He paused. Phineas Spear’s smile grew somewhat vague, his eyes grimly reflective, but he did not speak. The lawyer shook open the folded paper he carried — the News-Herald, Bardin’s paper. Three-inch headlines announced:
Spear took the paper, nodded. He opened it to the Editorial page and pretended to read, his voice bitter mockery:
Already tried and convicted in the Court of Public Opinion (Judge Bardin and the News-Herald presiding) we await only the rubber stamp of a guilty verdict to bring the crucifixion of Abel Parkes to a satisfactory conclusion. With nothing but the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence in this brutal murder of our — beloved — Ex-Senator Southard, we have battled to a fitting climax. We have elevated a broken and harmless old man to the scaffold. We have...
He broke off suddenly, then grated, “Pierson, it makes me sick! Abel Parkes no more killed the Senator than I did. He’s psychologically incapable of it — even physically incapable of driving a pair of rusty grass shears completely through the heart of a man as big as Southard was. Why it’s—”
“Libel, my lad!” Pierson cut in. “What you just read between the lines of Bardin’s editorial is splendidly obvious, but it’s also very close to libel if anyone else heard it! You know that, of course.”
Phineas Spear grinned again and they paused in front of the building with its dirty brick front, and brightly new plate glass windows lettered in gold: The Blade, P. Spear, Editor and Publisher.
“You’re not,” he inquired gently, “telling me to lie down and be good, are you, Counselor? You’re not advising me to quit and let the Blade sink back to the colorless, timid rag it was?”
“By no means!” Pierson’s voice acquired for a moment a ghost of its old ringing clarity. “But don’t give Bardin a chance to smash you for some small offense — such as libel. This town needs an opposition sheet. Give it to ’em, Spear — but build slowly, carefully.” The fire in his eyes died slowly. He drooped all at once. “Quite a speech,” he finished, “from the village drunk! Well — I’ll see you later.”
He turned away abruptly, crossed the street toward the back stairway leading to his own squalid, back-room office. And Phineas Spear watched the thin, stooped figure. Randall Pierson, once the most brilliant trial lawyer in the State. Destined for a great future — and caught in the maelstrom of the dirtiest political deal of the century! An unproven charge — never actually disbarred as a lawyer — it was enough to ruin his career. Until, in his own bitter words, he was the “village drunk.”
But out of that same deal, Spear knew, others had come into prominence. From it, Major Joe Bardin — owner and editor of the News-Herald — had risen to influence. “Build slowly, carefully,” Pierson had said. But as Phineas Spear turned and entered the Blade building, he thought: Slowly! When a man was being railroaded to the death-house. When others were climbing to ruthless power on a ladder of murder and terrorism?
“Mornin’, Chief! Look — this ad. Is it...”
“See Miss Collin,” Spear cut him off, and the grimy typesetter who had spoken looked at him again, then scratched his head. He turned toward the door next to the one through which Spear vanished. Two minutes later he emerged again, followed by a girl. She hesitated at Phineas Spear’s closed door, then opened it.