mirror of
https://github.com/standardebooks/o-henry_short-fiction.git
synced 2025-01-06 10:40:07 +08:00
Proofreading corrections
This commit is contained in:
vr8ce
parent
816065c81a
commit
0f2e029ee6
@ -76,9 +76,9 @@
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Sharp departed, and soon afterward Luke Standifer went down to the little hotel where he boarded and looked up the railroad timetable in the daily paper. Half an hour later he removed his coat and vest, and strapped a peculiarly constructed pistol holster across his shoulders, leaving the receptacle close under his left armpit. Into the holster he shoved a short-barrelled .44 calibre revolver. Putting on his clothes again, he strolled to the station and caught the five-twenty afternoon train for San Antonio.</p>
|
||||
<p>The San Antonio <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Express</i> of the following morning contained this sensational piece of news:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>Benton Sharp Meets His Match</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<p>Benton Sharp Meets His Match</p>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<b>The Most Noted Desperado in Southwest Texas Shot to Death in the Gold Front Restaurant—Prominent State Official Successfully Defends Himself Against the Noted Bully—Magnificent Exhibition of Quick Gun Play.</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The bottle oscillates from one to the other, continues to do so, and is not removed from the counter. The bartender sees two emaciated invalids dispose of enough Kentucky Belle to floor a dozen cowboys, without displaying any emotion save a sad and contemplative interest in the peregrinations of the bottle. So he is moved to manifest a solicitude as to the consequences.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Not on your Uncle Mark Hanna,” responds Toledo, “will we get drunk. We’ve been—vaccinated with whiskey—and—cod liver oil. What would send you to the police station—only gives us a thirst. S-s-set out another bottle.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It is slow work trying to meet death by that route. Some quicker way must be found. They leave the saloon and plunge again into the mist. The sidewalks are mere flanges at the base of the houses; the street a cold ravine, the fog filling it like a freshet. Not far away is the Mexican quarter. Conducted as if by wires along the heavy air comes a guitar’s tinkle, and the demoralizing voice of some señorita singing:</p>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song">
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="z3998:song" xml:lang="es">
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
<span>“En las tardes sombrillos del invierro</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -7,8 +7,10 @@
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-professional-secret" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Professional Secret</h2>
|
||||
<p>THE STORY OF A MAID MADE OVER</p>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">
|
||||
<span>A Professional Secret</span>
|
||||
<span epub:type="subtitle">The Story of a Maid Made Over</span>
|
||||
</h2>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Dr.</abbr> Satterfield Prince, physician to the leisure class, looked at his watch. It indicated five minutes to twelve. At the stroke of the hour would expire the morning term set apart for the reception of his patients in his handsome office apartments. And then the young woman attendant ushered in from the waiting-room the last unit of the wealthy and fashionable gathering that had come to patronize his skill.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Dr.</abbr> Prince turned, his watch still in hand, his manner courteous, but seeming to invite promptness and brevity in the interview. The last patient was a middle-aged lady, richly dressed, with an amiable and placid face. When she spoke her voice revealed the drawling, musical slur and intonation of the South. She had come, she leisurely explained, to bespeak the services of <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Prince in the case of her daughter, who was possessed of a most mysterious affliction. And then, femininely, she proceeded to exhaustively diagnose the affliction, informing the physician with a calm certitude of its origin and nature.</p>
|
||||
<p>The diagnosis advanced by the lady—<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Galloway Rankin—was one so marvelously strange and singular in its conception that <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Prince, accustomed as he was to the conceits and vagaries of wealthy malingerers, was actually dumfounded. The following is the matter of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Rankin’s statement, briefly reported:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
|
||||
<td>5,750.00</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
<tr>
|
||||
<td>Total</td>
|
||||
<td><b>Total</b></td>
|
||||
<td>$5,823.00</td>
|
||||
</tr>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span class="i1">Up in the Georgia hills.”</span>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“That’s great stuff, ma’am,” said J. Pinkney Bloom, enthusiastically, when the poetess had concluded. “I wish I had looked up poetry more than I have. I was raised in the pine hills myself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The mountains ever call to their children,” murmured <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Blaylock. “I feel that life will take on the rosy hue of hope again in among these beautiful hills. Peyton—a little taste of the currant wine, if you will be so good. The journey, though delightful in the extreme, slightly fatigues me.” Colonel Blaylock again visited the depths of his prolific coat, and produced a tightly corked, rough, black bottle. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bloom was on his feet in an instant.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let me bring a glass, ma’am. You come along, Colonel—there’s a little table we can bring, too. Maybe we can scare up some fruit or a cup of tea on board. I’ll ask Mac.”</p>
|
||||
@ -175,8 +175,6 @@
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“I believe not,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cooly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s a hymn,” said J. Pinkney Bloom. “Now, show me the way to a livery stable, son, for I’m going to hit the dirt road back to Okochee.”</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
|
||||
<p>When Chicken awoke his car was stationary. Looking out between the slats he saw it was a bright, moonlit night. Scrambling out, he saw his car with three others abandoned on a little siding in a wild and lonesome country. A cattle pen and chute stood on one side of the track. The railroad bisected a vast, dim ocean of prairie, in the midst of which Chicken, with his futile rolling stock, was as completely stranded as was Robinson with his landlocked boat.</p>
|
||||
<p>A white post stood near the rails. Going up to it, Chicken read the letters at the top, S. A. 90. Laredo was nearly as far to the south. He was almost a hundred miles from any town. Coyotes began to yelp in the mysterious sea around him. Chicken felt lonesome. He had lived in Boston without an education, in Chicago without nerve, in Philadelphia without a sleeping place, in New York without a pull, and in Pittsburg sober, and yet he had never felt so lonely as now.</p>
|
||||
<p>Suddenly through the intense silence, he heard the whicker of a horse. The sound came from the side of the track toward the east, and Chicken began to explore timorously in that direction. He stepped high along the mat of curly mesquit grass, for he was afraid of everything there might be in this wilderness—snakes, rats, brigands, centipedes, mirages, cowboys, fandangoes, tarantulas, tamales—he had read of them in the story papers. Rounding a clump of prickly pear that reared high its fantastic and menacing array of rounded heads, he was struck to shivering terror by a snort and a thunderous plunge, as the horse, himself startled, bounded away some fifty yards, and then resumed his grazing. But here was the one thing in the desert that Chicken did not fear. He had been reared on a farm; he had handled horses, understood them, and could ride.</p>
|
||||
<p>Approaching slowly and speaking soothingly, he followed the animal, which, after its first flight, seemed gentle enough, and secured the end of the twenty-foot lariat that dragged after him in the grass. It required him but a few moments to contrive the rope into an ingenious nose-bridle, after the style of the Mexican <i xml:lane="es">borsal</i>. In another he was upon the horse’s back and off at a splendid lope, giving the animal free choice of direction. “He will take me somewhere,” said Chicken to himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>Approaching slowly and speaking soothingly, he followed the animal, which, after its first flight, seemed gentle enough, and secured the end of the twenty-foot lariat that dragged after him in the grass. It required him but a few moments to contrive the rope into an ingenious nose-bridle, after the style of the Mexican <i xml:lang="es">borsal</i>. In another he was upon the horse’s back and off at a splendid lope, giving the animal free choice of direction. “He will take me somewhere,” said Chicken to himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>It would have been a thing of joy, that untrammelled gallop over the moonlit prairie, even to Chicken, who loathed exertion, but that his mood was not for it. His head ached; a growing thirst was upon him; the “somewhere” whither his lucky mount might convey him was full of dismal peradventure.</p>
|
||||
<p>And now he noted that the horse moved to a definite goal. Where the prairie lay smooth he kept his course straight as an arrow’s toward the east. Deflected by hill or arroyo or impractical spinous brakes, he quickly flowed again into the current, charted by his unerring instinct. At last, upon the side of a gentle rise, he suddenly subsided to a complacent walk. A stone’s cast away stood a little mott of coma trees; beneath it a jacal such as the Mexicans erect—a one-room house of upright poles daubed with clay and roofed with grass or tule reeds. An experienced eye would have estimated the spot as the headquarters of a small sheep ranch. In the moonlight the ground in the nearby corral showed pulverized to a level smoothness by the hoofs of the sheep. Everywhere was carelessly distributed the paraphernalia of the place—ropes, bridles, saddles, sheep pelts, wool sacks, feed troughs, and camp litter. The barrel of drinking water stood in the end of the two-horse wagon near the door. The harness was piled, promiscuous, upon the wagon tongue, soaking up the dew.</p>
|
||||
<p>Chicken slipped to earth, and tied the horse to a tree. He halloed again and again, but the house remained quiet. The door stood open, and he entered cautiously. The light was sufficient for him to see that no one was at home. The room was that of a bachelor ranchman who was content with the necessaries of life. Chicken rummaged intelligently until he found what he had hardly dared hope for—a small, brown jug that still contained something near a quart of his desire.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Del Delano entered Mike’s alone. So nearly concealed in a fur-lined overcoat and a derby two sizes too large for him was Prince Lightfoot that you saw of his face only his pale, hatchet-edged features and a pair of unwinking, cold, light blue eyes. Nearly every man lounging at Mike’s bar recognized the renowned product of the West Side. To those who did not, wisdom was conveyed by prodding elbows and growls of one-sided introduction.</p>
|
||||
<p>Upon Charley, one of the bartenders, both fame and fortune descended simultaneously. He had once been honored by shaking hands with the great Delano at a Seventh Avenue boxing bout. So with lungs of brass he now cried: “Hallo, Del, old man; what’ll it be?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mike, the proprietor, who was cranking the cash register, heard. On the next day he raised Charley’s wages five a week.</p>
|
||||
<p>Del Delano drank a pony beer, paying for it carelessly out of his nightly earnings of $42.85–5/7. He nodded amiably but coldly at the long line of Mike’s patrons and strolled past them into the rear room of the café. For he heard in there sounds pertaining to his own art—the light, stirring staccato of a buck-and-wing dance.</p>
|
||||
<p>Del Delano drank a pony beer, paying for it carelessly out of his nightly earnings of $42.85⁵⁄₇. He nodded amiably but coldly at the long line of Mike’s patrons and strolled past them into the rear room of the café. For he heard in there sounds pertaining to his own art—the light, stirring staccato of a buck-and-wing dance.</p>
|
||||
<p>In the back room Mac McGowan was giving a private exhibition of the genius of his feet. A few young men sat at tables looking on critically while they amused themselves seriously with beer. They nodded approval at some new fancy steps of Mac’s own invention.</p>
|
||||
<p>At the sight of the great Del Delano, the amateur’s feet stuttered, blundered, clicked a few times, and ceased to move. The tongues of one’s shoes become tied in the presence of the Master. Mac’s sallow face took on a slight flush.</p>
|
||||
<p>From the uncertain cavity between Del Delano’s hat brim and the lapels of his high fur coat collar came a thin puff of cigarette smoke and then a voice:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user