He handed over the letter and envelope, which I perused quickly. The envelope bore the address in the city of one James Gustavson, but the letter was unfinished, as if Cumberland had been interrupted in its writing. As Armbruster had proclaimed, his roommate had an attractive and easily readable hand.
Dear Oscar,
Thanks for your encouraging letter. Your old pal Saucy knew he could rely on a teammate. You are right that it was a breach of contract, and no one knows that blackguard O’Hara better than you. Don’t know how you lasted out the season. But does receiving less than promised really mean what we would like it to mean? For now, I am staying on here, but if events make it necessary, I shall certainly avail myself
And there it broke off in midsentence.
“What does it mean?” I wondered. “He addresses the envelope to James and writes a letter to Oscar. And who the devil is Saucy?”
Holmes told me, “I have an idea about that, but time is short. We must go our separate ways for the next few hours.” He instructed the cabby, then instructed me.
My assigned task was a puzzling one.
“You want me to do what?” I exclaimed. “But why?”
“There’s no time to explain. Simply get it done and meet me back at my hotel at seven this evening.”
Now I knew how Watson felt when kept in the dark. I grumbled a bit, but of course agreed to the mission.
The next morning, we were once again in Stagg’s office, and this time young Clayton Cumberland, clearly unharmed but shamefaced, was present as well. I still did not know the entire story yet, and listened closely to Holmes as he explained it to Stagg.
“To begin with, that message from Warner was obviously faked. The signature was positioned right in the middle of the page, suggesting that Warner’s secretary-I hardly think the great coach typewrites his own correspondence-is singularly lacking in the rudiments of his profession. Surely the body of the letter should be centered on the page, with the signature nearer the bottom. The implication was obvious: someone had obtained Coach Warner’s signature on a sheet of Carlisle Indian School letterhead, probably on the pretense of being an autograph collector, then added the typewritten message after the fact. Every typewriter has its own peculiarities. The one used for the bogus Warner letter had a small letter ‘e’ that struck slightly above the line and a small letter ‘o’ that was filled in because of a dirty key.”
“But, Mr. Holmes, who would do that, and why?” Stagg asked.
“Though I was puzzled as to his motive, I suspected Cumberland might have composed the message himself. However, his roommate told me that Cumberland does not typewrite, and I found no typewritten sheets among his papers that shared those characteristics.”
“Then who was responsible for the false message?” Stagg demanded.
“Armitage came up with a good idea.” (Had I? Not that I could remember.) “Could the person who faked the message be the reporter, Perry Garth? He told us that he was under pressure to recruit you as a writer, but you had spurned all his overtures. If he could make you angry enough about abuses by one of your coaching brethren, perhaps he believed he could get an exclusive story for his paper, and a lively one. We knew he had interviewed Warner at the Carlisle Indian School, so he could have obtained his autograph then. I asked Armitage to visit Garth’s office and obtain a sample of his typewritten copy. The peculiarities of the type proved the same machine had produced the supposed letter from Warner.
“But to make his plan work, Cumberland had to vanish. How could Garth manage that? What hold did he have over Cumberland? An unfinished letter on the young man’s desk gave me a clue. Stagg, you are well-known as a champion of amateur sports. Are your athletes allowed to play professionally?”
“Certainly not!” Stagg was outraged at the idea. “Playing professionally carries a stigma. It could result in disqualification and perhaps expulsion.”
“And if a college player were to play professionally as well, could he cover his tracks?”
“He might play under an alias,” Stagg said reluctantly, disgust in his tone.
“Exactly. Cumberland had addressed the envelope to James Gustavson, but the salutation of the letter was ‘Dear Oscar.’ In the third person, he referred to himself as Saucy.”
Holmes turned to me. “Cumberland sauce, Armitage. I’m sure you’ve enjoyed it on game dishes many times, as have I. Any Englishman would know it, including Cumberland as the product of an English family, thus the odd choice of alias. As teammates, the two young men called each other by their assumed names, and other clues in the letter suggest that they were paid for their efforts. The words ‘I shall certainly avail myself’ I suspected might refer to an invitation from this Oscar to stay with him should Cumberland feel the need to leave the University abruptly.”
Holmes gazed for a moment at Cumberland, who was looking more miserable by the moment.
“While Armitage was performing his errand at Garth’s office, I went to the address on the letter, found the two young men, and got the whole story out of them,” Holmes resumed. “Two summers ago, Cumberland briefly played professional baseball for a suburban team managed by a tight-fisted fellow named Brian O’Hara.”
“O’Hara promised me twenty dollars but paid me only five,” Cumberland muttered. “He claimed the box-office receipts had only been a quarter of what he expected.”
“Thus,” said Holmes, “the missing three quarters referred to by Cumberland. He asked some other players, including Gustavson, whom he knew as Oscar, if they had been similarly shorted, and learned they had not, but also that O’Hara was an unscrupulous employer who would cut every corner he could, and would often test new men by reneging on promises.”
Cumberland turned to Stagg. “I was so mad, Coach, I quit the team then and there. I never thought of myself as a professional, and after that experience I never even wanted to be a professional. I found another job, and as soon as I could, I sent O’Hara’s lousy five bucks back to him.”
“And how did Garth come into it?” Stagg asked him.
“He’d heard about my mistake some way and approached me one day after practice.”
“Blackmail?”
“That’s not how he put it. Oh, no, he was my friend. He was going to help me out. He claimed O’Hara was threatening to go to you with the truth. Garth said he knew a way to deter O’Hara, but it would be dangerous for me to be on campus. Not dangerous to me, Coach! Garth convinced me that if his plan failed, and O’Hara made his information public, my presence on campus would destroy University of Chicago football, and your own reputation with it.”
“And how was that to happen?” Stagg demanded skeptically.
“I don’t know. I was confused. Gustavson is studying law and had it in his mind that O’Hara’s breach of contract, plus my return of the one quarter he did pay me, somehow removed the taint of professionalism from my record.”
“That’s nonsense, boy!”
“I wasn’t convinced either,” Cumberland said ruefully. “I was working on that letter to Gustavson when a message came from Garth to leave the campus immediately. Coach Stagg, all I wanted was to play football for the University of Chicago!”
Stagg’s features hardened, his stare intensified, and we glimpsed for that moment his practice-field visage. “You jackass! You should have come to me and explained what was happening! Perhaps I could have helped you.”
“I didn’t think you’d understand. Everybody knows how down you are on professionals. Of course, I know now that Garth never meant to help me. He just wanted me out of the way until after the Carlisle game.”
“And he did all this to convince me to write for his newspaper?” Stagg said incredulously.