The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg Summary | Part 1 Summary

Hadleyburg is a small town that has long been noted for its honesty and uprightness. This reputation has remained intact for three generations and is something the town's residents are extremely proud of. The virtues of honesty are taught to each of Hadleyburg's residents from the time they are babies, and those lessons continue through all the years of schooling. Further, great care is taken to ensure that temptations are removed from the paths of the town's young people so that the lessons in honesty will have every chance to be absorbed and ingrained in their characters. Further, while the residents of nearby towns seem to begrudge the citizens of Hadleyburg their due recognition, it is also assumed that any young man coming from Hadleyburg need not supply any other references; his citizenship in that town is all that is needed to vouch for his character.

Life in Hadleyburg continues in this manner until one day a stranger passing through the town is unfortunately offended in some manner. While the citizens of Hadleyburg generally do not care about strangers or their opinions, it would have been wise for them to make an exception in this case, because this particular stranger is a bitter and vengeful man. So grievous is the offense committed against him that the man spends the better part of the ensuing year trying to devise a scheme that will bring down the entire town and attack the very thing each citizen holds dear - their honesty.

Six months later, the man returns to Hadleyburg late one evening bearing a heavy sack. He stops outside the home of a man named Richards who works as a cashier in the town's bank, and with the sack on his shoulder, he knocks at the door. The cashier's wife yells out for him to enter; he does so and then asks for the woman's husband. When she explains that he is out and will not return until later, the stranger tells her that he had come to leave the sack in his care until it can be delivered to its rightful owner. The stranger tells Mrs. Richards that there is a paper attached to the sack which explains everything, and then he leaves.

Mrs. Richards' curiosity is aroused, and so as soon as the stranger leaves her home, she goes to the sack to retrieve the paper. As she reads the letter, she realizes that the sack contains gold coins in the amount of forty thousand dollars. Almost by instinct, she drops the letter and goes to lock her door and draw her shades before returning to the letter to continue reading. As she reads, Mrs. Richards learns that the stranger was a gambler who had arrived in Hadleyburg sometime during the preceding two years. He had lost all of his money and, ashamed of the position in which he found himself,, had begged in the dark of night and had the fortune of receiving twenty dollars from a Hadleyburg citizen. The stranger had been able to parlay the twenty dollars into a sizable profit at the gambling table and had now returned to Hadleyburg to repay the man who had been so kind to him. The stranger does not know who the man is, but he is confident that given the town's honest fiber, the right man will be found and given the sack of money. He goes on to say that the man can be identified by a remark he made to the stranger on the night he gave him the twenty dollars. Before ending his letter, the stranger suggests the right man can be identified either publicly or privately and provides specific instructions for conducting each type of inquiry.

As Mrs. Richards contemplates all that she has read, she finds herself wishing that it had been her husband who provided the kindness to the stranger; then she admonishes herself to remember that the money in the sack was obtained through gambling - an illicit activity in the eyes of Hadleyburg's citizens. Before long, her husband Edward arrives home, clearly agitated by the fact that he must work such long hours. After a few moments of self-pity, he notices the sack and asks his wife what it contains. When she tells him of all that has transpired that evening, he seems awestruck and comments that the entire episode seems like some sort of adventure that one only reads about. When he suggests to his wife that they bury the money and burn the papers, she cuts him off, saying that it is getting late and she is fearful of burglars. After some discussion, they agree that the best method for identifying the rightful owner of the money is through a public inquiry, and so Mr. Richards leaves to go to the newspaper printer so an announcement of the inquiry can be made. He meets the printer in the street and is told that it may be too late for the announcement to appear the next day but that an effort to do so will be made.

When Mr. Richards returns home, he and his wife are too excited to sleep, and so they pass the time trying to guess who might have gifted the stranger with the twenty dollars. They both agree that the deceased Barclay Goodson must have been the benefactor. As they discuss this possibility, Mrs. Richards mentions the fact that aside from Reverend Burgess, Barclay Goodson had been the most hated man in Hadleyburg. When her husband suggests that perhaps Reverend Burgess isn't as mean-spirited as the town believes, his wife demands to know his reasons for saying this. Edward tells his wife that Reverend Burgess is actually innocent of the wrongdoing he had been accused of and that he (Edward) had information that could have exonerated Reverend Burgess; he had kept silent because he was afraid of the town's reprisals against him. At first his wife is shocked, but after a few moments, she tells her husband that she understands why he chose to act as he did and that under the same circumstances, she would have done the same. At the same time, she wonders what Reverend Burgess thinks of them, until her husband puts her fears to rest by telling her that Reverend Burgess had no idea that Edward could have saved him. Mrs. Richards tells her husband that given Reverend Burgess's demeanor, she should have known that he wasn't aware that Edward could have helped him. She goes on to say that when others observe Reverend Burgess talking to her, they tease her and refer to Burgess as "her friend," which makes her wish that he wouldn't speak to her at all. Edward tells his wife that Burgess is being friendly to her because, although Edward had not had the courage to come forth with the evidence of Burgess' innocence, he had protected him from the town's anger to an extent by warning him to leave town until the episode blew over. He had then managed to get the entire affair attributed to Goodson, and because Goodson is now dead, there is little chance that the truth will be revealed.

With that matter settled, the Richards' spend the rest of the evening lost in the solitude of their own thoughts. Eventually, Mrs. Richards starts to murmur portions of the Lord's Prayer, punctuating it with thoughts regarding their predicament. She soon begins to think that perhaps they had acted in haste and that maybe they should have kept the money rather than publishing the notice regarding the inquiry in the paper.

Meanwhile, the newspaper publisher, a man named Cox, has gone home and told his wife about what has happened. When his wife remarks that the only people who know about the sack are themselves and the Richardses, Cox leaves the house and goes in search of Richards. Meanwhile, Edward, having come to the same realization with his wife, is on his way to find Cox. The two men meet in the street, and as they affirm that no one else knows of the money, they are approached by a boy. Cox tells the boy not to ship the mail until he is instructed to do so. It is too late, though; due to a change in the timetables, the mail has already left. The two men walk away disappointed and wondering about all that might have been.

When Edward arrives home and tells his wife that it is too late to stop the notice of the public inquiry, she is clearly disappointed. Her disappointment soon turns to anger, and she admonishes her husband for acting in such haste. She tells him that had he stopped to think, he would have realized that since the rightful owner of the money is dead and has no heirs, they could have kept the money and no one would have known. When her husband reminds her that he had done exactly what the note ordered him to do, Mrs. Richards says that it almost seems as though some sort of divine intervention had brought the money to them and that perhaps they have been wrong to question it. Edward tells his wife that he had simply acted as he and all other residents of Hadleyburg had been trained to behave since their infancy, to which she replies that perhaps their honesty isn't as strong a virtue as they had believed it to be; after all, both of them had considered keeping the money.

The couple falls silent again, and then Mrs. Richards tells her husband that she thinks he is trying to guess the remark that the letter said would identify the anonymous benefactor; she admits that she is doing the same thing. They agree to pass the rest of the night trying to guess what the secret remark might be. The same scene is being played out at the Cox's home, while across town, the telegraph office is open much later than usual; the foreman has been given an assignment by the Associated Press to provide a detailed account of the mystery of the coin-filled sack.