The Empty Cab

Ink still wet on his press badge, cub reporter Henry Egbert Xerxes is ordered to sniff out a ring of counterfeiters that haunts the gin-soaked shadows of the Red Dog Inn—a dive whose scarlet sign pulsates like a fresh wound above the waterfront. On the very stoop of the newsroom he spots the same moon-eyed girl who earlier slipped bogus bills across a streetcar aisle; seconds later she is muscled into a hansom cab that melts into fog. Henry gives chase through cobblestone arteries, only to yank open the carriage door and confront null air: the vehicle is a vacuum, a magician’s hat without the rabbit. Undaunted, he prowls the tavern’s sawdust labyrinth, unmasking a dungeon where the girl—part pawn, part accomplice—hangs in burlap suspense. Fists, chairs, and kerosene lanterns fly in a Keystone-style cyclone until the duo burst into nocturnal freedom. Sprinting back to his boarding-house garret, Henry hammers out the scoop of his dreams, only to discover next morning that the front page remains virgin white. Outraged, he barges into the city desk to learn the vertiginous truth: every clue, every peril, every heartbeat was an elaborate newsroom prank designed to assay whether the tyro could sniff real news from artificial smoke.