[Letter on plain writing paper, Buffalo postmark, addressed to Miss S. Pellman, The Port Hume Beacon, 14 Main St., Port Hume. Hand-delivered by Pellman's cousin to Pellman's flat, at Pellman's request, after Pellman asked the Beacon's mailroom to not log the envelope. Five pages, Frye's hand. Preserved in Pellman's killed-stories cabinet, folder marked "FRYE / 1921 / NOT FOR PRINT — EVER."]

178 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, N.Y. 14 December 1921

Dear Miss Pellman,

I am writing this under the name you will not know — Mrs. Louise Thompson, married name, which I shall use from now on. My sister Della, who has opened her home to me, is a widow Thompson. We share the name enough for it to pass. I tell you this because if you write back please write to Mrs. Louise Thompson, 178 Delaware Ave., Buffalo. Please not to Frye.

I am well. I am not well. I am safe. I am not safe in the way one is after a fright. I do not sleep but I am physically whole. You may tell my aunt on Elm Street that I am so. Please do not tell the Hume Shipping office anything at all.

I promised you, on the day I left the Beacon foyer after we met in September, that if I ever decided to tell what I heard I would write it to you. I have decided now. I will tell it here in my own words and you may do with it what your conscience tells you to do with it. I want to ask one thing: do not publish my name. Not in this city, not in Buffalo. I will deny the letter exists if I am asked directly. You and I both will know that is not cowardice. It is what a switchboard girl has for currency.

Here is what I heard.

It was Wednesday the fourteenth of July, 1920. I have the date because I had taken the afternoon shift to cover for Mrs. Delaney whose daughter was sick. Ordinarily the afternoon is Mrs. D., the Prohibition office calls come in the morning and the high-dollar business afternoon. The Hume board is a switchboard of forty positions, twelve of them inside lines, the rest outgoing. I sat at position seven.

At about two-ten in the afternoon, Mr. Edmund Hume's private line from his office requested an outgoing call to the Harbor Police, to Chief Keane's desk extension. I placed the call. The line connected. I ought to have unplugged my listening jack at the moment the line connected. I did not. I will give you the reason. I had, for six months at that point, been receiving small gifts from the office — a box of good tea at Christmas, a pair of theater tickets when the road company came in October, a twenty-dollar holiday envelope the year before, which was more than a switchboard girl receives — and I had come to feel that there was a certain favor I was being kept in the mind of, and I had grown curious what was the thing I was in the mind of for. I kept the jack in. I listened.

The call lasted fourteen minutes. I wrote notes in my switchboard-slip shorthand on the back of a call-slip as it went on, because I have that habit. I burned the slip the night I left Port Hume, Miss Pellman, but I will tell you what was on it in as much as I can remember.

Mr. Hume began: "Keane, this will be a two-minute conversation and neither of us should write anything down." Chief Keane said: "Understood." Mr. Hume said: "The new law takes effect in January. I have a proposal. I will not put it to you through a middleman; I will not put it to you at your office; I will put it to you here, now, once. If we agree, we will not refer to it again by telephone. Do you want to hear."

Chief Keane said: "I will hear."

Mr. Hume said something about the north shore of the lake — of a Canadian port whose name I believe was Port Stanley but I am not certain — and about cargoes that the new law would make profitable if they came south. He spoke of Quay 3 by name. He spoke of a margin. He offered Chief Keane — I remember this precisely because I had never heard such sums spoken between two men in my life — twenty percent.

Chief Keane said: "Twenty is not enough. It is my slip. It is my men. It is my career if it goes wrong."

Mr. Hume said: "Twenty-five."

Chief Keane said: "Twenty-five you keep your own manifest, or thirty and I keep it."

Mr. Hume said, after a pause: "Twenty-five, and you keep the manifest."

Chief Keane said: "Done. I will come to Aldenhaven in August. We will agree the arrangement in more specific form there. Do not telephone on this again."

Mr. Hume said: "I will not."

The call ended. Mr. Hume's line disconnected first. Chief Keane's line held for a further six seconds. Then it disconnected.

I sat at position seven for the next forty minutes without being able to plug a single call. Mrs. Delaney came back at three and I told her I was feeling ill. I went home. I stopped at Frey's on Elm Street and bought a bottle of sherry. I drank a third of it before I ate supper. My aunt on Elm Street noticed. I told her I had had a long day.

I worked at Hume Shipping for another sixteen months after that day. In that time I placed, on the company switchboard, at least forty calls between Mr. Edmund Hume and people whose names I will not put into this letter — some of them aldermen, one of them a judge, some of them men I did not know — that I believe, without being able to prove, were all about the arrangement of which the July 14 call was the opening move. I did not listen in to any of those other calls, after the first one. I kept the listening jack out.

Then, on the morning of the 4th of November, 1921, Sgt. Byrnes of the Harbor Police came into the Hume Shipping lobby and stood in front of the switchboard room's doorway for what I estimated was a full minute, and looked at me, and did not speak. He was leaving the building; he had come from Mr. Hume's office. He looked at me. I looked down at my board. He did not speak. He turned and left the building.

I gave my notice the next morning. Mr. Hume, through Mr. Standard the office manager, set my pension at ninety dollars a month, which is twice what a switchboard operator of my tenure receives, and he set it to pay to a Buffalo post office box I had not yet opened. I understood this to mean he knew where I was going and that he wished me to go. I went.

I have not told any of this to anyone but you. Miss Pellman, I am trusting you with it. I have not decided whether I want this published. Some days I want it published very much. Some days I want, most of all, to be left alone in my sister's house with my small knitting basket until I am an old woman. I know which of those two things is the honorable one. I know also which of them I am going to choose. I am not an heroic person.

Please do not come to Buffalo. If you ever have reason to write to me, write only as I have told you.

If you never publish this letter, I will understand. If you one day do, I hope you will know that what you are publishing is the truth.

With care,

Louise (that was Miss Louisa Frye)

[at the bottom of the last page, in Pellman's pencil, a note to herself:]

"I have kept this letter for eleven months. I have written three different versions of a story from it, each shorter than the last. I have not filed any of them. Dreyfoos would kill anything I wrote from this. Louisa has asked me not to publish. The letter sits in the cabinet. Perhaps, one day, some younger editor than Dreyfoos. Perhaps not. — S.P., Nov 1922."