Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 25, No. 2, August 13, 1927

Another rumor credited a wealthy lady living on the north side of Washington Square with having bribed several of the jurors to bring in a verdict that would return Robinson to her waiting arms.

The public at large was never reconciled to the verdict. Robinson was hooted at and scorned until he found life too uncomfortable in New York City. So, within a short time of his acquittal he migrated speedily to Texas.

Rumors drifted back and were given space in the New York papers. It was said on one hand that Robinson had reformed, settled down, bad married a respectable girl and had already begun to raise a family. And on the other hand — and it is possible that the wish was father to the thought — another rumor believed by many was that Robinson in grief and remorse had committed suicide.

As for Furlong, the man who had first furnished Robinson with an alibi, he actually did jump from a boat into the North River a few weeks after the trial. And the anti-Robinson faction could see his death only as a confession of shame for his share in absolving Frank Robinson of the murder of Helen Jewett.

Out of the Hell-Box by Allen Saunders

He was only a printer’s devil, and yet something told him that Bert Huffy’s peculiarities went deeper than they seemed

I

I didn’t have any use for Bert Huffy from the first day that he set foot inside the Argus-Enterprise office and went to work on composition. He hadn’t been around for more than two-hours before he had dropped a hunk of hot type metal down the front of my overalls and held my arms behind me until the stuff had blistered a long streak on my leg. And every day after that he had a new scheme thought up for making my life more miserable.

The other fellows, especially the older men, got pretty tired of a great big hulk like him always picking on a fifteen-year-old kid, and he got sorer than a boiled owl when they went after him about it. After that he did most of his dirt on the sly, but he was meaner than ever, if that’s possible. Things around the shop had come to a place where it looked like a battle might break out just any time. Then Huffy’s wife died.

We all felt pretty bad the night it happened. I felt worse than anybody else, for a little while, because you see I was sort of responsible, you might say for the way she died. But that doesn’t come just yet in my story. I guess I’d better go back and start at the beginning.

I’d been devil on the Bardstown Argus-Enterprise for about a year when Huffy came to Herb Smith — Herb was foreman — and asked for a job in the composing room. Herb didn’t say yes right at first, and certainly nobody could blame him.

I never saw a worse looking sample of a tramp printer than this fellow was. It was in the middle of the winter, but Huffy didn’t have on enough clothes to pad a baby’s crutch. His old tom coat was turned up around his scrubby neck and his hat was pulled down low, but you could see enough of his face to know that he’d lost his last job because he saw all his letters double.

Besides, I could smell his gin breath clear down where I was sitting, between the type cases. While he talked he shifted back and forth on his feet, and the black snow-water squished out from the ends of his shoes every time he moved.

He put up a pretty whining sort of a Story, about how his wife was an invalid and he was trying to make enough to send her to some sort of a specialist. Herb had been short a man in the comp room ever since Harry Transcoe left to take a job in Columbus, so he wound up by taking Huffy on for a trial.

Huffy turned out to be an A-number-one man around the place. I’ll say that for him even if he did make life mighty miserable for me. The city government had the blind-pigs and ’leggers all scared out at that time, and Bert never had much chance to get tight, so it wasn’t long before he was a regular hand at the plant.

He rented a little house out at the edge of the town, just across the Hollow from my mother’s and had his wife come down from his sisters where she’d been living. I used to see her once in a while when I’d go past with my papers, but I never liked her much better than her old man.

She was a sloppy, fat old thing, always complaining because I didn’t throw the paper up on the porch, or else because it was hard on her heart for me to sling the folded copy against the front of the house with such a thump.

Nobody ever saw much of her around town. She didn’t even go to church. When Brother Beeson, our preacher, called on her to invite her to attend church she told him that her heart wouldn’t stand the least little shock, doctors had warned her, and that she was honestly afraid that the praying and singing — not to mention Brother Beeson’s ranting sermons — would be too much for her.