mirror of
https://github.com/standardebooks/o-henry_short-fiction.git
synced 2025-02-05 10:50:09 +08:00
Correct section epub:types, chapter headers
This commit is contained in:
vr8ce
parent
75f3404239
commit
9bc33044b8
@ -64,6 +64,7 @@
|
||||
<meta property="file-as" refines="#author">Henry, O.</meta>
|
||||
<meta property="se:url.encyclopedia.wikipedia" refines="#author">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry</meta>
|
||||
<meta property="se:url.authority.nacoaf" refines="#author">http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79071080</meta>
|
||||
<meta property="role" refines="#author" scheme="marc:relators">ann</meta>
|
||||
<meta property="role" refines="#author" scheme="marc:relators">aut</meta>
|
||||
<dc:contributor id="artist">COVER_ARTIST</dc:contributor>
|
||||
<meta property="file-as" refines="#artist">COVER_ARTIST_SORT</meta>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-bird-of-bagdad" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-bird-of-bagdad" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Bird of Bagdad</h2>
|
||||
<p>Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.</p>
|
||||
<p>Quigg’s restaurant is in Fourth Avenue—that street that the city seems to have forgotten in its growth. Fourth Avenue—born and bred in the Bowery—staggers northward full of good resolutions.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-call-loan" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-call-loan" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Call Loan</h2>
|
||||
<p>In those days the cattlemen were the anointed. They were the grandees of the grass, kings of the kine, lords of the lea, barons of beef and bone. They might have ridden in golden chariots had their tastes so inclined. The cattleman was caught in a stampede of dollars. It seemed to him that he had more money than was decent. But when he had bought a watch with precious stones set in the case so large that they hurt his ribs, and a California saddle with silver nails and Angora skin <i xml:lang="es">suaderos</i>, and ordered everybody up to the bar for whisky—what else was there for him to spend money for?</p>
|
||||
<p>Not so circumscribed in expedient for the reduction of surplus wealth were those lairds of the lariat who had womenfolk to their name. In the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does it become extinct.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-chaparral-prince" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-chaparral-prince" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Chaparral Prince</h2>
|
||||
<p>Nine o’clock at last, and the drudging toil of the day was ended. Lena climbed to her room in the third half-story of the Quarrymen’s Hotel. Since daylight she had slaved, doing the work of a full-grown woman, scrubbing the floors, washing the heavy ironstone plates and cups, making the beds, and supplying the insatiate demands for wood and water in that turbulent and depressing hostelry.</p>
|
||||
<p>The din of the day’s quarrying was over—the blasting and drilling, the creaking of the great cranes, the shouts of the foremen, the backing and shifting of the flatcars hauling the heavy blocks of limestone. Down in the hotel office three or four of the labourers were growling and swearing over a belated game of checkers. Heavy odours of stewed meat, hot grease, and cheap coffee hung like a depressing fog about the house.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-municipal-report" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-municipal-report" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Municipal Report</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph poem">
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-night-in-new-arabia" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-night-in-new-arabia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Night in New Arabia</h2>
|
||||
<p>The great city of Bagdad-on-the-Subway is caliph-ridden. Its palaces, bazaars, khans, and byways are thronged with Al Rashids in divers disguises, seeking diversion and victims for their unbridled generosity. You can scarcely find a poor beggar whom they are willing to let enjoy his spoils unsuccored, nor a wrecked unfortunate upon whom they will not reshower the means of fresh misfortune. You will hardly find anywhere a hungry one who has not had the opportunity to tighten his belt in gift libraries, nor a poor pundit who has not blushed at the holiday basket of celery-crowned turkey forced resoundingly through his door by the eleemosynary press.</p>
|
||||
<p>So then, fearfully through the Harun-haunted streets creep the one-eyed calenders, the Little Hunchback and the Barber’s Sixth Brother, hoping to escape the ministrations of the roving horde of caliphoid sultans.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-poor-rule" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-poor-rule" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Poor Rule</h2>
|
||||
<p>I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As “Harper’s Drawer” used to say in bygone years: “The following good story is told of Miss ⸻, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ⸻, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ⸻, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> ⸻.”</p>
|
||||
<p>We shall have to omit “Bishop X” and “the <abbr>Rev.</abbr> ⸻,” for they do not belong.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="a-ramble-in-aphasia" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="a-ramble-in-aphasia" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A Ramble in Aphasia</h2>
|
||||
<p>My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me to take care of my cold. I had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting—the level kiss of domesticity flavored with Young Hyson. There was no fear of the extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the deft touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and then, as I closed the door, I heard her morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.</p>
|
||||
<p>When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to occur. The attack came suddenly.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="an-afternoon-miracle" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="an-afternoon-miracle" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">An Afternoon Miracle</h2>
|
||||
<p>At the United States end of an international river bridge, four armed rangers sweltered in a little ‘dobe hut, keeping a fairly faithful espionage upon the lagging trail of passengers from the Mexican side.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bud Dawson, proprietor of the Top Notch Saloon, had, on the evening previous, violently ejected from his premises one Leandro Garcia, for alleged violation of the Top Notch code of behaviour. Garcia had mentioned twenty-four hours as a limit, by which time he would call and collect a painful indemnity for personal satisfaction.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="babes-in-the-jungle" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="babes-in-the-jungle" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Babes in the Jungle</h2>
|
||||
<p>Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe—you can’t count ’em!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Two years afterward I found that I couldn’t remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver’s advice.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,9 +6,9 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="best-seller" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="best-seller" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Best-Seller</h2>
|
||||
<h4>I</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh—well, I had to go there on business.</p>
|
||||
<p>My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one usually sees on chair-cars. Most of them were ladies in brown-silk dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted veils, who refused to have the windows raised. Then there was the usual number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any business and going almost anywhere. Some students of human nature can look at a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his occupation and his stations in life, both flag and social; but I never could. The only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller is when the train is held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the same time I do for the last towel in the dressing-room of the sleeper.</p>
|
||||
<p>The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the window-sill off to the left knee of my trousers. I removed it with an air of apology. The temperature was eighty-eight. One of the dotted-veiled ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators, and spoke loudly of Interlaken. I leaned back idly in chair <abbr>No.</abbr> 7, and looked with the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just visible above the back of <abbr>No.</abbr> 9.</p>
|
||||
@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
|
||||
<p>In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination. Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.</p>
|
||||
<p>I wish you might know John A. Pescud. He is of the stuff that heroes are not often lucky enough to be made of. He is a small man with a wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red spot on the end of your nose. I never saw him wear but one kind of necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes. He is as hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works; and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers compulsory, <abbr>St.</abbr> Peter will come down and sit at the foot of Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in the branch heaven. He believes that “our” plate-glass is the most important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.</p>
|
||||
<p>During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted, after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and coffee (hey, there!—with milk separate). Now I was to get more of his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at Coketown.</p>
|
||||
<h4>II</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Say,” said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his right shoe, “did you ever read one of these best-sellers? I mean the kind where the hero is an American swell—sometimes even from Chicago—who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling under an alias, and follows her to her father’s kingdom or principality? I guess you have. They’re all alike. Sometimes this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-broker worthy fifty millions. But he’s always ready to break into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B. and O. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason in the book for their being here.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and finds out who she is. He meets her on the <i xml:lang="de">corso</i> or the <i xml:lang="de">strasse</i> one evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring in three solid pages about America’s uncrowned sovereigns. If you’d take his remarks and set ’em to music, and then take the music away from ’em, they’d sound exactly like one of George Cohan’s songs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you know how it runs on, if you’ve read any of ’em—he slaps the king’s Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get in his way. He’s a great fencer, too. Now, I’ve known of some Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.</p>
|
||||
@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that! He’d be much more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I think I understand you, John,” said I. “You want fiction-writers to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn’t mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long Island clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Or plain business men with aristocracy high above ’em,” added Pescud. “It don’t jibe. People are divided into classes, whether we admit it or not, and it’s everybody’s impulse to stick to their own class. They do it, too. I don’t see why people go to work and buy hundreds of thousands of books like that. You don’t see or hear of any such didoes and capers in real life.”</p>
|
||||
<h4>III</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Well, John,” said I, “I haven’t read a best-seller in a long time. Maybe I’ve had notions about them somewhat like yours. But tell me more about yourself. Getting along all right with the company?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bully,” said Pescud, brightening at once. “I’ve had my salary raised twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too. I’ve bought a neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a house on it. Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares of stock. Oh, I’m in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter who’s elected!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Met your affinity yet, John?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
@ -100,7 +100,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says I, ‘I remember. My foot slipped as I was jumping on the step, and I nearly tumbled off.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know,’ says she. ‘And—and I—<em>I was afraid you had, John A. I was afraid you had.</em>’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows.”</p>
|
||||
<h4>IV</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">IV</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Coketown!” droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.</p>
|
||||
<p>Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of an old traveller.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I married her a year ago,” said John. “I told you I built a house in the East End. The belted—I mean the colonel—is there, too. I find him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any new story I might have picked up on the road.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="buried-treasure" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="buried-treasure" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Buried Treasure</h2>
|
||||
<p>There are many kinds of fools. Now, will everybody please sit still until they are called upon specifically to rise?</p>
|
||||
<p>I had been every kind of fool except one. I had expended my patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, lawn-tennis, and bucket-shops—parted soon with my money in many ways. But there remained one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not played. That was the Seeker after Buried Treasure. To few does the delectable furor come. But of all the would-be followers in the hoof-prints of King Midas none has found a pursuit so rich in pleasurable promise.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Silent—majority</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Unfortunate—pedestrians<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-1" id="noteref-1" epub:type="noteref">1</a></span>
|
||||
<span>Unfortunate—pedestrians<a href="endnotes.xhtml#note-2" id="noteref-2" epub:type="noteref">2</a></span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
<span>Richmond—in the field</span>
|
||||
<br/>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="caught" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="caught" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Caught</h2>
|
||||
<p>The plans for the detention of the flying President Miraflores and his companion at the coast line seemed hardly likely to fail. <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Zavalla himself had gone to the port of Alazan to establish a guard at that point. At Solitas the Liberal patriot Varras could be depended upon to keep close watch. Goodwin held himself responsible for the district about Coralio.</p>
|
||||
<p>The news of the president’s flight had been disclosed to no one in the coast towns save trusted members of the ambitious political party that was desirous of succeeding to power. The telegraph wire running from San Mateo to the coast had been cut far up on the mountain trail by an emissary of Zavalla’s. Long before this could be repaired and word received along it from the capital the fugitives would have reached the coast and the question of escape or capture been solved.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="christmas-by-injunction" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="christmas-by-injunction" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Christmas by Injunction</h2>
|
||||
<p>Cherokee was the civic father of Yellowhammer. Yellowhammer was a new mining town constructed mainly of canvas and undressed pine. Cherokee was a prospector. One day while his burro was eating quartz and pine burrs Cherokee turned up with his pick a nugget, weighing thirty ounces. He staked his claim and then, being a man of breadth and hospitality, sent out invitations to his friends in three States to drop in and share his luck.</p>
|
||||
<p>Not one of the invited guests sent regrets. They rolled in from the Gila country, from Salt River, from the Pecos, from Albuquerque and Phoenix and Santa Fe, and from the camps intervening.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="compliments-of-the-season" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="compliments-of-the-season" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Compliments of the Season</h2>
|
||||
<p>There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to very questionable sources—facts and philosophy. We will begin with—whichever you choose to call it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rattrap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="cupid-a-la-carte" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="cupid-a-la-carte" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Cupid a La Carte</h2>
|
||||
<p>“The dispositions of woman,” said Jeff Peters, after various opinions on the subject had been advanced, “run, regular, to diversions. What a woman wants is what you’re out of. She wants more of a thing when it’s scarce. She likes to have souvenirs of things that never happened. She likes to be reminded of things she never heard of. A one-sided view of objects is disjointing to the female composition.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis a misfortune of mine, begotten by nature and travel,” continued Jeff, looking thoughtfully between his elevated feet at the grocery stove, “to look deeper into some subjects than most people do. I’ve breathed gasoline smoke talking to street crowds in nearly every town in the United States. I’ve held ’em spellbound with music, oratory, sleight of hand, and prevarications, while I’ve sold ’em jewelry, medicine, soap, hair tonic, and junk of other nominations. And during my travels, as a matter of recreation and expiation, I’ve taken cognisance some of women. It takes a man a lifetime to find out about one particular woman; but if he puts in, say, ten years, industrious and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex. One lesson I picked up was when I was working the West with a line of Brazilian diamonds and a patent fire kindler just after my trip from Savannah down through the cotton belt with Dalby’s Anti-explosive Lamp Oil Powder. ’Twas when the Oklahoma country was in first bloom. Guthrie was rising in the middle of it like a lump of self-raising dough. It was a boom town of the regular kind—you stood in line to get a chance to wash your face; if you ate over ten minutes you had a lodging bill added on; if you slept on a plank at night they charged it to you as board the next morning.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="cupids-exile-number-two" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="cupids-exile-number-two" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Cupid’s Exile Number Two</h2>
|
||||
<p>The United States of America, after looking over its stock of consular timber, selected <abbr>Mr.</abbr> John De Graffenreid Atwood, of Dalesburg, Alabama, for a successor to Willard Geddie, resigned.</p>
|
||||
<p>Without prejudice to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Atwood, it will have to be acknowledged that, in this instance, it was the man who sought the office. As with the self-banished Geddie, it was nothing less than the artful smiles of lovely woman that had driven Johnny Atwood to the desperate expedient of accepting office under a despised Federal Government so that he might go far, far away and never see again the false, fair face that had wrecked his young life. The consulship at Coralio seemed to offer a retreat sufficiently removed and romantic enough to inject the necessary drama into the pastoral scenes of Dalesburg life.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="dicky" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="dicky" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Dicky</h2>
|
||||
<p>There is little consecutiveness along the Spanish Main. Things happen there intermittently. Even Time seems to hang his scythe daily on the branch of an orange tree while he takes a siesta and a cigarette.</p>
|
||||
<p>After the ineffectual revolt against the administration of President Losada, the country settled again into quiet toleration of the abuses with which he had been charged. In Coralio old political enemies went arm-in-arm, lightly eschewing for the time all differences of opinion.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -5,18 +5,15 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<<<<<<< HEAD
|
||||
<<<<<<< HEAD
|
||||
<body epub:type="backmatter z3998:non-fiction">
|
||||
<section id="endnotes" epub:type="endnotes">
|
||||
<ol>
|
||||
<li id="note-1" epub:type="endnote">
|
||||
<p>The methods of the <abbr>Rev.</abbr> Sam Jones, who was the Billy Sunday of his time, were frequently the subject of O. Henry’s satire. <a href="a-cheering-thought.xhtml#noteref-1" epub:type="backlink">↩</a></p>
|
||||
=======
|
||||
<body epub:type="backmatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="endnotes" epub:type="endnotes">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Endnotes</h2>
|
||||
<ol>
|
||||
<li id="note-1" epub:type="endnote">
|
||||
<p>The methods of the <abbr>Rev.</abbr> Sam Jones, who was the Billy Sunday of his time, were frequently the subject of O. Henry’s satire. <a href="a-cheering-thought.xhtml#noteref-1" epub:type="backlink">↩</a></p>
|
||||
<li id="note-2" epub:type="endnote">
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vesey afterward explained that the logical journalistic complement of the word “unfortunate” was once the word “victim.” But, since the automobile became so popular, the correct following word is now “pedestrians.” Of course, in Calloway’s code it meant infantry. <a href="calloways-code.xhtml#noteref-2" epub:type="backlink">↩</a></p>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li id="note-3" epub:type="endnote">
|
||||
<p>See advertising column, “Where to Dine Well,” in the daily newspapers. <a href="a-dinner-at-3.xhtml#noteref-3" epub:type="backlink">↩</a></p>
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
@ -46,24 +43,8 @@
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
<li id="note-12" epub:type="endnote">
|
||||
<p>An estate famous in Texas legal history. It took many, many years for adjustment and a large part of the property was, of course, consumed as expenses of litigation. <a href="fickle-fortune-or-how-gladys-hustled.xhtml#noteref-12" epub:type="backlink">↩</a></p>
|
||||
>>>>>>> rolling-stones/master
|
||||
=======
|
||||
<body epub:type="backmatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="endnotes" epub:type="endnotes">
|
||||
<ol>
|
||||
<li id="note-1" epub:type="endnote">
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Vesey afterward explained that the logical journalistic complement of the word “unfortunate” was once the word “victim.” But, since the automobile became so popular, the correct following word is now “pedestrians.” Of course, in Calloway’s code it meant infantry. <a href="chapter-4.xhtml#noteref-1" epub:type="backlink">↩</a></p>
|
||||
>>>>>>> whirligigs/master
|
||||
</li>
|
||||
</ol>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
<<<<<<< HEAD
|
||||
<<<<<<< HEAD
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
=======
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
>>>>>>> rolling-stones/master
|
||||
=======
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
>>>>>>> whirligigs/master
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="fox-in-the-morning" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="fox-in-the-morning" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">“Fox-In-The-Morning”</h2>
|
||||
<p>Coralio reclined, in the midday heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem. The town lay at the sea’s edge on a strip of alluvial coast. It was set like a little pearl in an emerald band. Behind it, and seeming almost to topple, imminent, above it, rose the sea-following range of the Cordilleras. In front the sea was spread, a smiling jailer, but even more incorruptible than the frowning mountains. The waves swished along the smooth beach; the parrots screamed in the orange and ceiba-trees; the palms waved their limber fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to enter.</p>
|
||||
<p>Suddenly the town was full of excitement. A native boy dashed down a grass-grown street, shrieking: “<i xml:lang="es">Busca el Señor Goodwin. Ha venido un telégrafo por el!</i>”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="he-also-serves" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="he-also-serves" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">He Also Serves</h2>
|
||||
<p>If I could have a thousand years—just one little thousand years—more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.</p>
|
||||
<p>Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread—deafness and writer’s cramp. The hand is yet steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower of fortune.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="hearts-and-crosses" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="hearts-and-crosses" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Hearts and Crosses</h2>
|
||||
<p>Baldy Woods reached for the bottle, and got it. Whenever Baldy went for anything he usually—but this is not Baldy’s story. He poured out a third drink that was larger by a finger than the first and second. Baldy was in consultation; and the consultee is worthy of his hire.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’d be king if I was you,” said Baldy, so positively that his holster creaked and his spurs rattled.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -12,11 +12,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“But can thim that helps others help thimselves!”</p>
|
||||
<cite>—Mulvaney.</cite>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-1" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<p>This is the story that William Trotter told me on the beach at Aguas Frescas while I waited for the gig of the captain of the fruit steamer <i epub:type="se:vessel.ship">Andador</i> which was to take me abroad. Reluctantly I was leaving the Land of Always Afternoon. William was remaining, and he favored me with a condensed oral autobiography as we sat on the sands in the shade cast by the Bodega Nacional.</p>
|
||||
<p>As usual, I became aware that the Man from Bombay had already written the story; but as he had compressed it to an eight-word sentence, I have become an expansionist, and have quoted his phrase above, with apologies to him and best regards to <em>Terence</em>.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t you ever have a desire to go back to the land of derby hats and starched collars?” I asked him. “You seem to be a handy man and a man of action,” I continued, “and I am sure I could find you a comfortable job somewhere in the States.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Ragged, shiftless, barefooted, a confirmed eater of the lotus, William Trotter had pleased me much, and I hated to see him gobbled up by the tropics.</p>
|
||||
@ -49,7 +49,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Industry,’ says I, promptly. ‘I’m hardworking, diligent, industrious, and energetic.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘My dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Trotter,’ says he, ‘surely I’ve known you long enough to tell you you are a liar. Every man must have his own particular weakness, and his own particular strength in other things. Now, you will buy me a drink of rum, and we will call on President Gomez.’ ”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir,” Trotter went on, “we walks the four miles out, through a virgin conservatory of palms and ferns and other roof-garden products, to the president’s summer White House. It was blue, and reminded you of what you see on the stage in the third act, which they describe as ‘same as the first’ on the programs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“There was more than fifty people waiting outside the iron fence that surrounded the house and grounds. There was generals and agitators and épergnes in gold-laced uniforms, and citizens in diamonds and Panama hats—all waiting to get an audience with the Royal Five-Card Draw. And in a kind of a summerhouse in front of the mansion we could see a burnt-sienna man eating breakfast out of gold dishes and taking his time. I judged that the crowd outside had come out for their morning orders and requests, and was afraid to intrude.</p>
|
||||
@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
<p>But a soft voice called across the blazing sands. A girl, faintly lemon-tinted, stood in the Calle Real and called. She was bare-armed—but what of that?</p>
|
||||
<p>“It’s her!” said William Trotter, looking. “She’s come back! I’m obliged; but I can’t take the job. Thanks, just the same. Ain’t it funny how we can’t do nothing for ourselves, but we can do wonders for the other fellow? You was about to get me with your financial proposition; but we’ve all got our weak points. Timotea’s mine. And, say!” Trotter had turned to leave, but he retraced the step or two that he had taken. “I like to have left you without saying goodbye,” said he. “It kind of rattles you when they go away unexpected for a month and come back the same way. Shake hands. So long! Say, do you remember them gunshots we heard a while ago up at the cuartel? Well, I knew what they was, but I didn’t mention it. It was Clifford Wainwright being shot by a squad of soldiers against a stone wall for giving away secrets of state to that Nicamala republic. Oh, yes, it was rum that did it. He backslided and got his. I guess we all have our weak points, and can’t do much toward helping ourselves. Mine’s waiting for me. I’d have liked to have that job with your brother, but—we’ve all got our weak points. So long!”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="helping-the-other-fellow-4" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">IV</h3>
|
||||
<p>A big black Carib carried me on his back through the surf to the ship’s boat. On the way the purser handed me a letter that he had brought for me at the last moment from the post-office in Aguas Frescas. It was from my brother. He requested me to meet him at the <abbr>St.</abbr> Charles Hotel in New Orleans and accept a position with his house—in either cotton, sugar, or sheetings, and with five thousand dollars a year as my salary.</p>
|
||||
<p>When I arrived at the Crescent City I hurried away—far away from the <abbr>St.</abbr> Charles to a dim <i xml:lang="fr">chambre garnie</i> in Bienville Street. And there, looking down from my attic window from time to time at the old, yellow, absinthe house across the street, I wrote this story to buy my bread and butter.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Hostages to Momus</h2>
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-1" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and undertook a thing that I’d have to apologize for even under the New Jersey trust laws.</p>
|
||||
<p>Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was down in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas running a peripatetic lottery and monte game. Now, selling lottery tickets is a government graft in Mexico, just like selling forty-eight cents’ worth of postage-stamps for forty-nine cents is over here. So Uncle Porfirio he instructs the rurales to attend to our case.</p>
|
||||
@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“It’s a great town for epicures,” says I. “You’d soon fall into their ways if you was there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’ve heard it was,” says Caligula. “But I reckon I wouldn’t. I can polish my fingernails all they need myself.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>After breakfast we went out on the front porch, lighted up two of the landlord’s <i xml:lang="es">flor de upas</i> perfectos, and took a look at Georgia.</p>
|
||||
<p>The installment of scenery visible to the eye looked mighty poor. As far as we could see was red hills all washed down with gullies and scattered over with patches of piny woods. Blackberry bushes was all that kept the rail fences from falling down. About fifteen miles over to the north was a little range of well-timbered mountains.</p>
|
||||
@ -57,7 +57,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“It ain’t exactly set forth in the papers,” says Caligula. “I suppose it’s a matter of sentiment. You know he wrote this poem, ‘Little Breeches’; and them Greeks wear little or none. But anyhow, John Hay sends the Brooklyn and the Olympia over, and they cover Africa with thirty-inch guns. And then Hay cables after the health of the persona grata. ‘And how are they this morning?’ he wires. ‘Is Burdick Harris alive yet, or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Raisuli dead?’ And the King of Morocco sends up the seventy thousand dollars, and they turn Burdick Harris loose. And there’s not half the hard feelings among the nations about this little kidnapping matter as there was about the peace congress. And Burdick Harris says to the reporters, in the Greek language, that he’s often heard about the United States, and he admires Roosevelt next to Raisuli, who is one of the whitest and most gentlemanly kidnappers that he ever worked alongside of. So you see, Pick,” winds up Caligula, “we’ve got the law of nations on our side. We’ll cut this colonel man out of the herd, and corral him in them little mountains, and stick up his heirs and assigns for ten thousand dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, you seldom little redheaded territorial terror,” I answers, “you can’t bluff your uncle Tecumseh Pickens! I’ll be your company in this graft. But I misdoubt if you’ve absorbed the inwardness of this Burdick Harris case, Calig; and if on any morning we get a telegram from the Secretary of State asking about the health of the scheme, I propose to acquire the most propinquitous and celeritous mule in this section and gallop diplomatically over into the neighboring and peaceful nation of Alabama.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>Me and Caligula spent the next three days investigating the bunch of mountains into which we proposed to kidnap Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham. We finally selected an upright slice of topography covered with bushes and trees that you could only reach by a secret path that we cut out up the side of it. And the only way to reach the mountain was to follow up the bend of a branch that wound among the elevations.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then I took in hand an important subdivision of the proceedings. I went up to Atlanta on the train and laid in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar supply of the most gratifying and efficient lines of grub that money could buy. I always was an admirer of viands in their more palliative and revised stages. Hog and hominy are not only inartistic to my stomach, but they give indigestion to my moral sentiments. And I thought of Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, president of the Sunrise & Edenville Tap Railroad, and how he would miss the luxury of his home fare as is so famous among wealthy Southerners. So I sunk half of mine and Caligula’s capital in as elegant a layout of fresh and canned provisions as Burdick Harris or any other professional kidnappee ever saw in a camp.</p>
|
||||
@ -90,7 +90,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Me and Caligula read it, and decided to let it go; for we, being cooks, were amenable to praise, though it sounded out of place on a sight draft for ten thousand dollars.</p>
|
||||
<p>I took the letter over to the Mountain Valley road and watched for a messenger. By and by a colored equestrian came along on horseback, riding toward Edenville. I gave him a dollar to take the letter to the railroad offices; and then I went back to camp.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="hostages-to-momus-4" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">IV</h3>
|
||||
<p>About four o’clock in the afternoon, Caligula, who was acting as lookout, calls to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have to report a white shirt signalling on the starboard bow, sir.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="hygeia-at-the-solito" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="hygeia-at-the-solito" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Hygeia at the Solito</h2>
|
||||
<p>If you are knowing in the chronicles of the ring you will recall to mind an event in the early ‘nineties when, for a minute and sundry odd seconds, a champion and a “would-be” faced each other on the alien side of an international river. So brief a conflict had rarely imposed upon the fair promise of true sport. The reporters made what they could of it, but, divested of padding, the action was sadly fugacious. The champion merely smote his victim, turned his back upon him, remarking, “I know what I done to dat stiff,” and extended an arm like a ship’s mast for his glove to be removed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Which accounts for a trainload of extremely disgusted gentlemen in an uproar of fancy vests and neckwear being spilled from their pullmans in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which “Cricket” McGuire found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to San Antonian ears. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman—may his shadow never measure under six foot two.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hayes-and-muriel" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Jimmy Hayes and Muriel</h2>
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hanes-and-muriel-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hanes-and-muriel-1" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>Supper was over, and there had fallen upon the camp the silence that accompanies the rolling of cornhusk cigarettes. The water hole shone from the dark earth like a patch of fallen sky. Coyotes yelped. Dull thumps indicated the rocking-horse movements of the hobbled ponies as they moved to fresh grass. A half-troop of the Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers were distributed about the fire.</p>
|
||||
<p>A well-known sound—the fluttering and scraping of chaparral against wooden stirrups—came from the thick brush above the camp. The rangers listened cautiously. They heard a loud and cheerful voice call out reassuringly:</p>
|
||||
@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The ranger took Muriel from Hayes’s knee and went back to his seat on a roll of blankets. The captive twisted and clawed and struggled vigorously in his hand. After holding it for a moment or two, the ranger set it upon the ground. Awkwardly, but swiftly the frog worked its four oddly moving legs until it stopped close by Hayes’s foot.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, dang my hide!” said the other ranger. “The little cuss knows you. Never thought them insects had that much sense!”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hanes-and-muriel-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hanes-and-muriel-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>Jimmy Hayes became a favourite in the ranger camp. He had an endless store of good-nature, and a mild, perennial quality of humour that is well adapted to camp life. He was never without his horned frog. In the bosom of his shirt during rides, on his knee or shoulder in camp, under his blankets at night, the ugly little beast never left him.</p>
|
||||
<p>Jimmy was a humourist of a type that prevails in the rural South and West. Unskilled in originating methods of amusing or in witty conceptions, he had hit upon a comical idea and clung to it reverently. It had seemed to Jimmy a very funny thing to have about his person, with which to amuse his friends, a tame horned frog with a red ribbon around its neck. As it was a happy idea, why not perpetuate it?</p>
|
||||
@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
|
||||
<p>So Manning’s detachment of McLean’s company, Frontier Battalion, was gloomy. It was the first blot on its escutcheon. Never before in the history of the service had a ranger shown the white feather. All of them had liked Jimmy Hayes, and that made it worse.</p>
|
||||
<p>Days, weeks, and months went by, and still that little cloud of unforgotten cowardice hung above the camp.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hanes-and-muriel-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="jimmy-hanes-and-muriel-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>Nearly a year afterward—after many camping grounds and many hundreds of miles guarded and defended—Lieutenant Manning, with almost the same detachment of men, was sent to a point only a few miles below their old camp on the river to look after some smuggling there. One afternoon, while they were riding through a dense mesquite flat, they came upon a patch of open hog-wallow prairie. There they rode upon the scene of an unwritten tragedy.</p>
|
||||
<p>In a big hog-wallow lay the skeletons of three Mexicans. Their clothing alone served to identify them. The largest of the figures had once been Sebastiano Saldar. His great, costly sombrero, heavy with gold ornamentation—a hat famous all along the Rio Grande—lay there pierced by three bullets. Along the ridge of the hog-wallow rested the rusting Winchesters of the Mexicans—all pointing in the same direction.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Lord Oakhurst’s Curse</h2>
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-1" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>Lord Oakhurst lay dying in the oak chamber in the eastern wing of Oakhurst Castle. Through the open window in the calm of the summer evening, came the sweet fragrance of the early violets and budding trees, and to the dying man it seemed as if earth’s loveliness and beauty were never so apparent as on this bright June day, his last day of life.</p>
|
||||
<p>His young wife, whom he loved with a devotion and strength that the presence of the king of terrors himself could not alter, moved about the apartment, weeping and sorrowful, sometimes arranging the sick man’s pillow and inquiring of him in low, mournful tones if anything could be done to give him comfort, and again, with stifled sobs, eating some chocolate caramels which she carried in the pocket of her apron. The servants went to and fro with that quiet and subdued tread which prevails in a house where death is an expected guest, and even the crash of broken china and shivered glass, which announced their approach, seemed to fall upon the ear with less violence and sound than usual.</p>
|
||||
@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
|
||||
<p>How plainly he remembered how she had, with girlish shyness and coyness, at first hesitated, and murmured something to herself about “an old bald-beaded galoot,” but when he told her that to him life without her would be a blasted mockery, and that his income was £50,000 a year, she threw herself on to him and froze there with the tenacity of a tick on a brindled cow, and said, with tears of joy, “Hen-ery, I am thine.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And now he was dying. In a few short hours his spirit would rise up at the call of the Destroyer and, quitting his poor, weak, earthly frame, would go forth into that dim and dreaded Unknown Land, and solve with certainty that Mystery which revealeth itself not to mortal man.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>A carriage drove rapidly up the avenue and stopped at the door. Sir Everhard FitzArmond, the famous London physician, who had been telegraphed for, alighted and quickly ascended the marble steps. Lady Oakhurst met him at the door, her lovely face expressing great anxiety and grief. “Oh, Sir Everhard, I am so glad you have come. He seems to be sinking rapidly. Did you bring the cream almonds I mentioned in the telegram?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sir Everhard did not reply, but silently handed her a package, and, slipping a couple of cloves into his mouth, ascended the stairs that led to Lord Oakhurst’s apartment. Lady Oakhurst followed.</p>
|
||||
@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Sir Everhard FitzArmond picked up the paper and read its contents. It was Lord Oakhurst’s will, bequeathing all his property to a scientific institution which should have for its object the invention of a means for extracting peach brandy from sawdust.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sir Everhard glanced quickly around the room. No one was in sight. Dropping the will, he rapidly transferred some valuable ornaments and rare specimens of gold and silver filigree work from the centre table to his pockets, and rang the bell for the servants.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title">
|
||||
<span epub:type="z3998:roman">III</span>
|
||||
<span epub:type="subtitle">The Curse</span>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="masters-of-arts" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="masters-of-arts" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Masters of Arts</h2>
|
||||
<p>A two-inch stub of a blue pencil was the wand with which Keogh performed the preliminary acts of his magic. So, with this he covered paper with diagrams and figures while he waited for the United States of America to send down to Coralio a successor to Atwood, resigned.</p>
|
||||
<p>The new scheme that his mind had conceived, his stout heart endorsed, and his blue pencil corroborated, was laid around the characteristics and human frailties of the new president of Anchuria. These characteristics, and the situation out of which Keogh hoped to wrest a golden tribute, deserve chronicling contributive to the clear order of events.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="money-maze" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="money-maze" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Money Maze</h2>
|
||||
<p>The new administration of Anchuria entered upon its duties and privileges with enthusiasm. Its first act was to send an agent to Coralio with imperative orders to recover, if possible, the sum of money ravished from the treasury by the ill-fated Miraflores.</p>
|
||||
<p>Colonel Emilio Falcon, the private secretary of Losada, the new president, was despatched from the capital upon this important mission.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="no-story" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="no-story" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">No Story</h2>
|
||||
<p>To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor, no prodigy “cub” reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story—no anything.</p>
|
||||
<p>But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the reporters’ room of the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Morning Beacon</i>, I will repay the favor by keeping strictly my promises set forth above.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="past-one-at-rooneys" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="past-one-at-rooneys" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Past One at Rooney’s</h2>
|
||||
<p>Only on the lower East Side of New York do the houses of Capulet and Montagu survive. There they do not fight by the book of arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb at an upholder of your opposing house you have work cut out for your steel. On Broadway you may drag your man along a dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the East Side Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the niceties of deportment to the wink of any eyelash and to an inch of elbow room at the bar when its patrons include foes of your house and kin.</p>
|
||||
<p>So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork McManus, drifted into Dutch Mike’s for a stein of beer, and came upon a bunch of Montagus making merry with the suds, he began to observe the strictest parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his leaving the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered him to a place at the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance of the enemy’s movements that his indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; experience whispered to him that the finger of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at Dutch Mike’s that night. Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the Dry Dock Gang, minding their P’s and Q’s so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his customers and the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was his custom to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival associations congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="proof-of-the-pudding" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="proof-of-the-pudding" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Proof of the Pudding</h2>
|
||||
<p>Spring winked a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook of the <i>Minerva Magazine</i>, and deflected him from his course. He had lunched in his favorite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to his office when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in Twenty-sixth Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue, and meandered along the walks of budding Madison Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a pastoral; the color motif was green—the presiding shade at the creation of man and vegetation.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="psyche-and-the-pskyscraper" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="psyche-and-the-pskyscraper" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Psyche and the Pskyscraper</h2>
|
||||
<p>If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the top of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically without aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home. The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.</p>
|
||||
<p>Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Except the roisterers in the tavern, the village folk were abed. David crept softly into his room in the shed of his father’s cottage and made a bundle of his small store of clothing. With this upon a staff, he set his face outward upon the road that ran from Vernoy.</p>
|
||||
<p>He passed his father’s herd of sheep, huddled in their nightly pen—the sheep he herded daily, leaving them to scatter while he wrote verses on scraps of paper. He saw a light yet shining in Yvonne’s window, and a weakness shook his purpose of a sudden. Perhaps that light meant that she rued, sleepless, her anger, and that morning might—But, no! His decision was made. Vernoy was no place for him. Not one soul there could share his thoughts. Out along that road lay his fate and his future.</p>
|
||||
<p>Three leagues across the dim, moonlit champaign ran the road, straight as a ploughman’s furrow. It was believed in the village that the road ran to Paris, at least; and this name the poet whispered often to himself as he walked. Never so far from Vernoy had David travelled before.</p>
|
||||
<section id="roads-of-destiny-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="roads-of-destiny-1" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title">The Left Branch</h3>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
@ -106,7 +106,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Come,” boomed the great voice of the marquis, “out with you to the carriage! Daybreak shall not find you on my hands. Wed you shall be again, and to a living husband, this night. The next we come upon, my lady, highwayman or peasant. If the road yields no other, then the churl that opens my gates. Out with you into the carriage!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The marquis, implacable and huge, the lady wrapped again in the mystery of her cloak, the postilion bearing the weapons—all moved out to the waiting carriage. The sound of its ponderous wheels rolling away echoed through the slumbering village. In the hall of the Silver Flagon the distracted landlord wrung his hands above the slain poet’s body, while the flames of the four and twenty candles danced and flickered on the table.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="roads-of-destiny-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="roads-of-destiny-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3>The Right Branch</h3>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
@ -223,7 +223,7 @@
|
||||
<p>But it seemed that, for some reason, the plotters had slightly altered their plans. When the royal carriage had reached the Rue Christopher, one square nearer than the Rue Esplanade, forth from it burst Captain Desrolles, with his band of would-be regicides, and assailed the equipage. The guards upon the carriage, though surprised at the premature attack, descended and fought valiantly. The noise of conflict attracted the force of Captain Tetreau, and they came pelting down the street to the rescue. But, in the meantime, the desperate Desrolles had torn open the door of the king’s carriage, thrust his weapon against the body of the dark figure inside, and fired.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, with loyal reinforcements at hand, the street rang with cries and the rasp of steel, but the frightened horses had dashed away. Upon the cushions lay the dead body of the poor mock king and poet, slain by a ball from the pistol of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="roads-of-destiny-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="roads-of-destiny-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3>The Main Road</h3>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="rouge-et-noir" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="rouge-et-noir" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Rouge Et Noir</h2>
|
||||
<p>It has been indicated that disaffection followed the elevation of Losada to the presidency. This feeling continued to grow. Throughout the entire republic there seemed to be a spirit of silent, sullen discontent. Even the old Liberal party to which Goodwin, Zavalla and other patriots had lent their aid was disappointed. Losada had failed to become a popular idol. Fresh taxes, fresh import duties and, more than all, his tolerance of the outrageous oppression of citizens by the military had rendered him the most obnoxious president since the despicable Alforan. The majority of his own cabinet were out of sympathy with him. The army, which he had courted by giving it license to tyrannize, had been his main, and thus far adequate support.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the most impolitic of the administration’s moves had been when it antagonized the Vesuvius Fruit Company, an organization plying twelve steamers and with a cash capital somewhat larger than Anchuria’s surplus and debt combined.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="rus-in-urbe" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="rus-in-urbe" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Rus in Urbe</h2>
|
||||
<p>Considering men in relation to money, there are three kinds whom I dislike: men who have more money than they can spend; men who have more money than they do spend; and men who spend more money than they have. Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for the first. But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions—I’ve forgotten exactly how many.</p>
|
||||
<p>I did not leave town that summer. I usually went down to a village on the south shore of Long Island. The place was surrounded by duck-farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty windmills made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if I were in my own flat six doors from the elevated railroad in New York. But that summer I did not go. Remember that. One of my friends asked me why I did not. I replied:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,9 +6,9 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="schools-and-schools" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="schools-and-schools" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Schools and Schools</h2>
|
||||
<h4>I</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35 East Fifty-Soforth Street. He was a downtown broker, so rich that he could afford to walk—for his health—a few blocks in the direction of his office every morning, and then call a cab.</p>
|
||||
<p>He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named Gilbert—Cyril Scott could play him nicely—who was becoming a successful painter as fast as he could squeeze the paint out of his tubes. Another member of the household was Barbara Ross, a step-niece. Man is born to trouble; so, as old Jerome had no family of his own, he took up the burdens of others.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly. There was a tacit and tactical understanding all round that the two would stand up under a floral bell some high noon, and promise the minister to keep old Jerome’s money in a state of high commotion. But at this point complications must be introduced.</p>
|
||||
@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Thanks,” said Nevada.</p>
|
||||
<p>“And I am going to call you ‘cousin,’ ” said Gilbert, with his charming smile.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Take the valise, please,” said Nevada. “It weighs a million pounds. It’s got samples from six of dad’s old mines in it,” she explained to Barbara. “I calculate they’d assay about nine cents to the thousand tons, but I promised him to bring them along.”</p>
|
||||
<h4>II</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and a nobleman, or—well, any of those problems—as the triangle. But they are never unqualified triangles. They are always isosceles—never equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert and Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle; and of that triangle Barbara formed the hypotenuse.</p>
|
||||
<p>One morning old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the dullest morning paper in the city before setting forth to his down-town fly-trap. He had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in her much of his dead brother’s quiet independence and unsuspicious frankness.</p>
|
||||
<p>A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren.</p>
|
||||
@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“You bet we’ll go. I’ll answer for Miss Barbara. Tell the boy to say to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Warren, ‘You bet we’ll go.’ ”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nevada,” called old Jerome, “pardon me, my dear, but wouldn’t it be as well to send him a note in reply? Just a line would do.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No, I won’t bother about that,” said Nevada, gayly. “Gilbert will understand—he always does. I never rode in an automobile in my life; but I’ve paddled a canoe down Little Devil River through the Lost Horse Cañon, and if it’s any livelier than that I’d like to know!”</p>
|
||||
<h4>III</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>Two months are supposed to have elapsed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Barbara sat in the study of the hundred-thousand-dollar house. It was a good place for her. Many places are provided in the world where men and women may repair for the purpose of extricating themselves from divers difficulties. There are cloisters, wailing-places, watering-places, confessionals, hermitages, lawyer’s offices, beauty parlors, air-ships, and studies; and the greatest of these are studies.</p>
|
||||
<p>It usually takes a hypotenuse a long time to discover that it is the longest side of a triangle. But it’s a long line that has no turning.</p>
|
||||
@ -77,7 +77,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then read it aloud,” she said. “Since you’ve already read it, what’s the difference? If <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Warren has written to me something that any one else oughtn’t to know, that is all the more reason why everybody should know it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well,” said Barbara, “this is what it says: ‘Dearest Nevada—Come to my studio at twelve o’clock to-night. Do not fail.’ ” Barbara rose and dropped the note in Nevada’s lap. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, “that I knew. It isn’t like Gilbert. There must be some mistake. Just consider that I am ignorant of it, will you, dear? I must go up-stairs now, I have such a headache. I’m sure I don’t understand the note. Perhaps Gilbert has been dining too well, and will explain. Good night!”</p>
|
||||
<h4>IV</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">IV</h3>
|
||||
<p>Nevada tiptoed to the hall, and heard Barbara’s door close upstairs. The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve was fifteen minutes away. She ran swiftly to the front door, and let herself out into the snow-storm. Gilbert Warren’s studio was six squares away.</p>
|
||||
<p>By aerial ferry the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the city from beyond the sullen East River. Already the snow lay a foot deep on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like scaling-ladders against the walls of the besieged town. The Avenue was as quiet as a street in Pompeii. Cabs now and then skimmed past like white-winged gulls over a moonlit ocean; and less frequent motor-cars—sustaining the comparison—hissed through the foaming waves like submarine boats on their jocund, perilous journeys.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way. She looked up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray, drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints. They were so like the wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such as the hundred-thousand-dollar house had seldom brought her.</p>
|
||||
@ -109,7 +109,7 @@
|
||||
<p>He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on of his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was looking at him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had a flush on them beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind and snow; but her eyes were steady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I was going to tell you,” she said, “anyhow, before you—before we—before—well, before anything. Dad never gave me a day of schooling. I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now if—”</p>
|
||||
<p>Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the somnolent, and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.</p>
|
||||
<h4>V</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">V</h3>
|
||||
<p>When <abbr>Mr.</abbr> and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert said:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter that you received to-night?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Fire away!” said his bride.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="seats-of-the-haughty" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="seats-of-the-haughty" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Seats of the Haughty</h2>
|
||||
<p>Golden by day and silver by night, a new trail now leads to us across the Indian Ocean. Dusky kings and princes have found our Bombay of the West; and few be their trails that do not lead down to Broadway on their journey for to admire and for to see.</p>
|
||||
<p>If chance should ever lead you near a hotel that transiently shelters some one of these splendid touring grandees, I counsel you to seek Lucullus Polk among the republican tuft-hunters that besiege its entrances. He will be there. You will know him by his red, alert, Wellington-nosed face, by his manner of nervous caution mingled with determination, by his assumed promoter’s or broker’s air of busy impatience, and by his bright-red necktie, gallantly redressing the wrongs of his maltreated blue serge suit, like a battle standard still waving above a lost cause. I found him profitable; and so may you. When you do look for him, look among the light-horse troop of Bedouins that besiege the picket-line of the travelling potentate’s guards and secretaries—among the wild-eyed genii of Arabian Afternoons that gather to make astounding and egregrious demands upon the prince’s coffers.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="ships" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="ships" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Ships</h2>
|
||||
<p>Within a week a suitable building had been secured in the Calle Grande, and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hemstetter’s stock of shoes arranged upon their shelves. The rent of the store was moderate; and the stock made a fine showing of neat white boxes, attractively displayed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnny’s friends stood by him loyally. On the first day Keogh strolled into the store in a casual kind of way about once every hour, and bought shoes. After he had purchased a pair each of extension soles, congress gaiters, button kids, low-quartered calfs, dancing pumps, rubber boots, tans of various hues, tennis shoes and flowered slippers, he sought out Johnny to be prompted as to names of other kinds that he might inquire for. The other English-speaking residents also played their parts nobly by buying often and liberally. Keogh was grand marshal, and made them distribute their patronage, thus keeping up a fair run of custom for several days.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="shoes" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="shoes" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Shoes</h2>
|
||||
<p>John De Graffenreid Atwood ate of the lotus, root, stem, and flower. The tropics gobbled him up. He plunged enthusiastically into his work, which was to try to forget Rosine.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, they who dine on the lotus rarely consume it plain. There is a sauce <i xml:lang="es">au diable</i> that goes with it; and the distillers are the chefs who prepare it. And on Johnny’s menu card it read “brandy.” With a bottle between them, he and Billy Keogh would sit on the porch of the little consulate at night and roar out great, indecorous songs, until the natives, slipping hastily past, would shrug a shoulder and mutter things to themselves about the “<i xml:lang="es">Americanos diablos</i>.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="smith" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="smith" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Smith</h2>
|
||||
<p>Goodwin and the ardent patriot, Zavalla, took all the precautions that their foresight could contrive to prevent the escape of President Miraflores and his companion. They sent trusted messengers up the coast to Solitas and Alazan to warn the local leaders of the flight, and to instruct them to patrol the water line and arrest the fugitives at all hazards should they reveal themselves in that territory. After this was done there remained only to cover the district about Coralio and await the coming of the quarry. The nets were well spread. The roads were so few, the opportunities for embarkation so limited, and the two or three probable points of exit so well guarded that it would be strange indeed if there should slip through the meshes so much of the country’s dignity, romance, and collateral. The president would, without doubt, move as secretly as possible, and endeavour to board a vessel by stealth from some secluded point along the shore.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the fourth day after the receipt of Englehart’s telegram the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Karlsefin</i>, a Norwegian steamer chartered by the New Orleans fruit trade, anchored off Coralio with three hoarse toots of her siren. The <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Karlsefin</i> was not one of the line operated by the Vesuvius Fruit Company. She was something of a dilettante, doing odd jobs for a company that was scarcely important enough to figure as a rival to the Vesuvius. The movements of the <i epub:type="se:name.vessel.ship">Karlsefin</i> were dependent upon the state of the market. Sometimes she would ply steadily between the Spanish Main and New Orleans in the regular transport of fruit; next she would be making erratic trips to Mobile or Charleston, or even as far north as New York, according to the distribution of the fruit supply.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="strictly-business" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="strictly-business" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Strictly Business</h2>
|
||||
<p>I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You’ve been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like this:</p>
|
||||
<p>Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own (madam) if they weren’t padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew’s real name is Boyle O’Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he was.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="supply-and-demand" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="supply-and-demand" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Supply and Demand</h2>
|
||||
<p>Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat needs to be cleaned again.</p>
|
||||
<p>Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and forty. You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street. When business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of the sweatshops.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="telemachus-friend" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="telemachus-friend" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Telemachus, Friend</h2>
|
||||
<p>Returning from a hunting trip, I waited at the little town of Los Pinos, in New Mexico, for the southbound train, which was one hour late. I sat on the porch of the Summit House and discussed the functions of life with Telemachus Hicks, the hotel proprietor.</p>
|
||||
<p>Perceiving that personalities were not out of order, I asked him what species of beast had long ago twisted and mutilated his left ear. Being a hunter, I was concerned in the evils that may befall one in the pursuit of game.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-admiral" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-admiral" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Admiral</h2>
|
||||
<p>Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration. Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hands point forever to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly-installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets. The government philosophically set about supplying the deficiency by increasing the import duties and by “suggesting” to wealthy private citizens that contributions according to their means would be considered patriotic and in order. Prosperity was expected to attend the reign of Losada, the new president. The ousted officeholders and military favourites organized a new “Liberal” party, and began to lay their plans for a re-succession. Thus the game of Anchurian politics began, like a Chinese comedy, to unwind slowly its serial length. Here and there Mirth peeps for an instant from the wings and illumines the florid lines.</p>
|
||||
<p>A dozen quarts of champagne in conjunction with an informal sitting of the president and his cabinet led to the establishment of the navy and the appointment of Felipe Carrera as its admiral.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-caballeros-way" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-caballeros-way" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Caballero’s Way</h2>
|
||||
<p>The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it—because he was quick-tempered—to avoid arrest—for his own amusement—any reason that came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-call-of-the-tame" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-call-of-the-tame" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Call of the Tame</h2>
|
||||
<p>When the inauguration was accomplished—the proceedings were made smooth by the presence of the Rough Riders—it is well known that a herd of those competent and loyal ex-warriors paid a visit to the big city. The newspaper reporters dug out of their trunks the old broad-brimmed hats and leather belts that they wear to North Beach fish fries, and mixed with the visitors. No damage was done beyond the employment of the wonderful plural “tenderfeet” in each of the scribe’s stories. The Westerners mildly contemplated the skyscrapers as high as the third story, yawned at Broadway, hunched down in the big chairs in hotel corridors, and altogether looked as bored and dejected as a member of Ye Ancient and Honorable Artillery separated during a sham battle from his valet.</p>
|
||||
<p>Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy’s Gentlemen of the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-day-resurgent" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-day-resurgent" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Day Resurgent</h2>
|
||||
<p>I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number.</p>
|
||||
<p>First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice <abbr>St.</abbr> Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the “Lethergogallagher,” or whatever it was that Trilby called it.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-duel" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-duel" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Duel</h2>
|
||||
<p>The gods, lying beside their nectar on ‘Lympus and peeping over the edge of the cliff, perceive a difference in cities. Although it would seem that to their vision towns must appear as large or small anthills without special characteristics, yet it is not so. Studying the habits of ants from so great a height should be but a mild diversion when coupled with the soft drink that mythology tells us is their only solace. But doubtless they have amused themselves by the comparison of villages and towns; and it will be no news to them (nor, perhaps, to many mortals), that in one particularity New York stands unique among the cities of the world. This shall be the theme of a little story addressed to the man who sits smoking with his Sabbath-slippered feet on another chair, and to the woman who snatches the paper for a moment while boiling greens or a narcotized baby leaves her free. With these I love to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.</p>
|
||||
<p>New York City is inhabited by 4,000,000 mysterious strangers; thus beating Bird Centre by three millions and half a dozen nine’s. They came here in various ways and for many reasons—Hendrik Hudson, the art schools, green goods, the stork, the annual dressmakers’ convention, the Pennsylvania Railroad, love of money, the stage, cheap excursion rates, brains, personal column ads., heavy walking shoes, ambition, freight trains—all these have had a hand in making up the population.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-fifth-wheel" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-fifth-wheel" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Fifth Wheel</h2>
|
||||
<p>The ranks of the Bed Line moved closer together; for it was cold. They were alluvial deposit of the stream of life lodged in the delta of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The Bed Liners stamped their freezing feet, looked at the empty benches in Madison Square whence Jack Frost had evicted them, and muttered to one another in a confusion of tongues. The Flatiron Building, with its impious, cloud-piercing architecture looming mistily above them on the opposite delta, might well have stood for the tower of Babel, whence these polyglot idlers had been called by the winged walking delegate of the Lord.</p>
|
||||
<p>Standing on a pine box a head higher than his flock of goats, the Preacher exhorted whatever transient and shifting audience the north wind doled out to him. It was a slave market. Fifteen cents bought you a man. You deeded him to Morpheus; and the recording angel gave you credit.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-flag-paramount" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-flag-paramount" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Flag Paramount</h2>
|
||||
<p>At the head of the insurgent party appeared that Hector and learned Theban of the southern republics, Don Sabas Placido. A traveller, a soldier, a poet, a scientist, a statesman and a connoisseur—the wonder was that he could content himself with the petty, remote life of his native country.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is a whim of Placido’s,” said a friend who knew him well, “to take up political intrigue. It is not otherwise than as if he had come upon a new tempo in music, a new bacillus in the air, a new scent, or rhyme, or explosive. He will squeeze this revolution dry of sensations, and a week afterward will forget it, skimming the seas of the world in his brigantine to add to his already world-famous collections. Collections of what? <i xml:lang="es">Por Dios!</i> of everything from postage stamps to prehistoric stone idols.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-girl-and-the-graft" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-girl-and-the-graft" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Girl and the Graft</h2>
|
||||
<p>The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to a pulp.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now and then when Pogue has made a good haul he comes to New York for a rest. He says the jug of wine and loaf of bread and Thou in the wilderness business is about as much rest and pleasure to him as sliding down the bumps at Coney would be to President Taft. “Give me,” says Pogue, “a big city for my vacation. Especially New York. I’m not much fond of New Yorkers, and Manhattan is about the only place on the globe where I don’t find any.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-girl-and-the-habit" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-girl-and-the-habit" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Girl and the Habit</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-gold-that-glittered" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-gold-that-glittered" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Gold That Glittered</h2>
|
||||
<p>A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it. All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid.</p>
|
||||
<p>Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto. Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their shibboleth: “ ‘Nit,’ says I to Frohman, ‘you can’t touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,’ and out I walks.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
|
||||
<span>The Great French Detective, in Austin</span>
|
||||
<span epub:type="subtitle">A Successful Political Intrigue</span>
|
||||
</h2>
|
||||
<section id="the-great-french-detective-in-austin-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-great-french-detective-in-austin-1" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>It is not generally known that Tictocq, the famous French detective, was in Austin last week. He registered at the Avenue Hotel under an assumed name, and his quiet and reserved manners singled him out at once for one not to be singled out.</p>
|
||||
<p>No one knows why he came to Austin, but to one or two he vouchsafed the information that his mission was an important one from the French Government.</p>
|
||||
@ -49,7 +49,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Jim.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You can go.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="the-great-french-detective-in-austin-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-great-french-detective-in-austin-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>The drawing-rooms of one of the most magnificent private residences in Austin are a blaze of lights. Carriages line the streets in front, and from gate to doorway is spread a velvet carpet, on which the delicate feet of the guests may tread.</p>
|
||||
<p>The occasion is the entrée into society of one of the fairest buds in the City of the Violet Crown. The rooms are filled with the culture, the beauty, the youth and fashion of society. Austin society is acknowledged to be the wittiest, the most select, and the highest bred to be found southwest of Kansas City.</p>
|
||||
@ -81,7 +81,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The company is returning, no longer hearing the music.</p>
|
||||
<p>Tictooq hesitates not. He seizes the professor, throws him upon the floor, tears off his shoes and socks, and escapes with the latter through the open window into the garden.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="the-great-french-detective-in-austin-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-great-french-detective-in-austin-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">III</h3>
|
||||
<p>Tictocq’s room in the Avenue Hotel.</p>
|
||||
<p>A knock is heard at the door.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-handbook-of-hymen" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-handbook-of-hymen" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Handbook of Hymen</h2>
|
||||
<p>’Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can’t tell me why our college professors shouldn’t be transferred to the meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the main office what kind of weather to expect. But there’s the other side of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.</p>
|
||||
<p>We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-head-hunter" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-head-hunter" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Head-Hunter</h2>
|
||||
<p>When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the Philippine Islands. There I remained as bush-whacker correspondent for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news. So I resigned, and came home.</p>
|
||||
<p>On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the yellow-brown people. The manœuvres and skirmishings of the petty war interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon us out of an unguessable past.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-hiding-of-black-bill" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-hiding-of-black-bill" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Hiding of Black Bill</h2>
|
||||
<p>A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los Pinos swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man, fat, melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat—seamy on both sides.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ain’t seen you in about four years, Ham,” said the seedy man. “Which way you been travelling?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-higher-abdication" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-higher-abdication" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Higher Abdication</h2>
|
||||
<p>Curly the tramp sidled toward the free-lunch counter. He caught a fleeting glance from the bartender’s eye, and stood still, trying to look like a business man who had just dined at the Menger and was waiting for a friend who had promised to pick him up in his motor car. Curly’s histrionic powers were equal to the impersonation; but his makeup was wanting.</p>
|
||||
<p>The bartender rounded the bar in a casual way, looking up at the ceiling as though he was pondering some intricate problem of kalsomining, and then fell upon Curly so suddenly that the roadster had no excuses ready. Irresistibly, but so composedly that it seemed almost absendmindedness on his part, the dispenser of drinks pushed Curly to the swinging doors and kicked him out, with a nonchalance that almost amounted to sadness. That was the way of the Southwest.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,16 +6,16 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-higher-pragmatism" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-higher-pragmatism" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Higher Pragmatism</h2>
|
||||
<h4>I</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">I</h3>
|
||||
<p>Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import. The ancients are discredited; Plato is boiler-plate; Aristotle is tottering; Marcus Aurelius is reeling; Æsop has been copyrighted by Indiana; Solomon is too solemn; you couldn’t get anything out of Epictetus with a pick.</p>
|
||||
<p>The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and industry in the school-readers, has been proven to be a doddering idiot and a waster of time and effort. The owl to-day is hooted at. Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted diabolo. Graybeards give glowing testimonials to the venders of patent hair-restorers. There are typographical errors in the almanacs published by the daily newspapers. College professors have become—</p>
|
||||
<p>But there shall be no personalities.</p>
|
||||
<p>To sit in classes, to delve into the encyclopedia or the past-performances page, will not make us wise. As the poet says, “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.” Wisdom is dew, which, while we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes us, and makes us grow. Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned on us through a hose. It disturbs our roots.</p>
|
||||
<p>Then, let us rather gather wisdom. But how to do so requires knowledge. If we know a thing, we know it; but very often we are not wise to it that we are wise, and—</p>
|
||||
<p>But let’s go on with the story.</p>
|
||||
<h4>II</h4>
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title z3998:roman">II</h3>
|
||||
<p>Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in a little city park. Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when I sat on the bench next to him. He was a musty, dingy, and tattered magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure. He turned out to be a scrap-book.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a newspaper reporter,” I said to him, to try him. “I have been detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones who spend their evenings in this park. May I ask you to what you attribute your downfall in—”</p>
|
||||
<p>I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase—a laugh so rusty and unpractised that I was sure it had been his first for many a day.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-indian-summer-of-dry-valley-johnson" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-indian-summer-of-dry-valley-johnson" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson</h2>
|
||||
<p>Dry Valley Johnson shook the bottle. You have to shake the bottle before using; for sulphur will not dissolve. Then Dry Valley saturated a small sponge with the liquid and rubbed it carefully into the roots of his hair. Besides sulphur there was sugar of lead in it and tincture of nux vomica and bay rum. Dry Valley found the recipe in a Sunday newspaper. You must next be told why a strong man came to fall a victim to a Beauty Hint.</p>
|
||||
<p>Dry Valley had been a sheepman. His real name was Hector, but he had been rechristened after his range to distinguish him from “Elm Creek” Johnson, who ran sheep further down the Frio.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-lotus-and-the-bottle" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-lotus-and-the-bottle" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Lotus and the Bottle</h2>
|
||||
<p>Willard Geddie, consul for the United States in Coralio, was working leisurely on his yearly report. Goodwin, who had strolled in as he did daily for a smoke on the much coveted porch, had found him so absorbed in his work that he departed after roundly abusing the consul for his lack of hospitality.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I shall complain to the civil service department,” said Goodwin;—“or is it a department?—perhaps it’s only a theory. One gets neither civility nor service from you. You won’t talk; and you won’t set out anything to drink. What kind of a way is that of representing your government?”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-missing-chord" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-missing-chord" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Missing Chord</h2>
|
||||
<p>I stopped overnight at the sheep-ranch of Rush Kinney, on the Sandy Fork of the Nueces. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Kinney and I had been strangers up to the time when I called “Hallo!” at his hitching-rack; but from that moment until my departure on the next morning we were, according to the Texas code, undeniable friends.</p>
|
||||
<p>After supper the ranchman and I lugged our chairs outside the two-room house, to its floorless gallery roofed with chaparral and sacuista grass. With the rear legs of our chairs sinking deep into the hardpacked loam, each of us reposed against an elm pillar of the structure and smoked El Toro tobacco, while we wrangled amicably concerning the affairs of the rest of the world.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-moment-of-victory" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-moment-of-victory" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Moment of Victory</h2>
|
||||
<p>Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine—which should enable you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico perpetually blow.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal’s guard of cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will attest.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-phonograph-and-the-graft" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-phonograph-and-the-graft" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Phonograph and the Graft</h2>
|
||||
<p>“What was this graft?” asked Johnny, with the impatience of the great public to whom tales are told.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Tis contrary to art and philosophy to give you the information,” said Keogh, calmly. “The art of narrative consists in concealing from your audience everything it wants to know until after you expose your favourite opinions on topics foreign to the subject. A good story is like a bitter pill with the sugar coating inside of it. I will begin, if you please, with a horoscope located in the Cherokee Nation; and end with a moral tune on the phonograph.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-pimienta-pancakes" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-pimienta-pancakes" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Pimienta Pancakes</h2>
|
||||
<p>While we were rounding up a bunch of the Triangle-O cattle in the Frio bottoms a projecting branch of a dead mesquite caught my wooden stirrup and gave my ankle a wrench that laid me up in camp for a week.</p>
|
||||
<p>On the third day of my compulsory idleness I crawled out near the grub wagon, and reclined helpless under the conversational fire of Judson Odom, the camp cook. Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-poet-and-the-peasant" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-poet-and-the-peasant" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Poet and the Peasant</h2>
|
||||
<p>The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-princess-and-the-puma" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-princess-and-the-puma" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Princess and the Puma</h2>
|
||||
<p>There had to be a king and queen, of course. The king was a terrible old man who wore six-shooters and spurs, and shouted in such a tremendous voice that the rattlers on the prairie would run into their holes under the prickly pear. Before there was a royal family they called the man “Whispering Ben.” When he came to own 50,000 acres of land and more cattle than he could count, they called him O’Donnell “the Cattle King.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The queen had been a Mexican girl from Laredo. She made a good, mild, Colorado-claro wife, and even succeeded in teaching Ben to modify his voice sufficiently while in the house to keep the dishes from being broken. When Ben got to be king she would sit on the gallery of Espinosa Ranch and weave rush mats. When wealth became so irresistible and oppressive that upholstered chairs and a centre table were brought down from San Antone in the wagons, she bowed her smooth, dark head, and shared the fate of the Danae.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-ransom-of-mack" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-ransom-of-mack" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Ransom of Mack</h2>
|
||||
<p>Me and old Mack Lonsbury, we got out of that Little Hide-and-Seek gold mine affair with about $40,000 apiece. I say “old” Mack; but he wasn’t old. Forty-one, I should say; but he always seemed old.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Andy,” he says to me, “I’m tired of hustling. You and me have been working hard together for three years. Say we knock off for a while, and spend some of this idle money we’ve coaxed our way.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-reformation-of-calliope" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-reformation-of-calliope" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Reformation of Calliope</h2>
|
||||
<p>Calliope Catesby was in his humours again. Ennui was upon him. This goodly promontory, the earth—particularly that portion of it known as Quicksand—was to him no more than a pestilent congregation of vapours. Overtaken by the megrims, the philosopher may seek relief in soliloquy; my lady find solace in tears; the flaccid Easterner scold at the millinery bills of his women folk. Such recourse was insufficient to the denizens of Quicksand. Calliope, especially, was wont to express his ennui according to his lights.</p>
|
||||
<p>Over night Calliope had hung out signals of approaching low spirits. He had kicked his own dog on the porch of the Occidental Hotel, and refused to apologise. He had become capricious and faultfinding in conversation. While strolling about he reached often for twigs of mesquite and chewed the leaves fiercely. That was always an ominous act. Another symptom alarming to those who were familiar with the different stages of his doldrums was his increasing politeness and a tendency to use formal phrases. A husky softness succeeded the usual penetrating drawl in his tones. A dangerous courtesy marked his manners. Later, his smile became crooked, the left side of his mouth slanting upward, and Quicksand got ready to stand from under.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-remnants-of-the-code" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-remnants-of-the-code" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Remnants of the Code</h2>
|
||||
<p>Breakfast in Coralio was at eleven. Therefore the people did not go to market early. The little wooden market-house stood on a patch of short-trimmed grass, under the vivid green foliage of a breadfruit tree.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thither one morning the venders leisurely convened, bringing their wares with them. A porch or platform six feet wide encircled the building, shaded from the mid-morning sun by the projecting, grass-thatched roof. Upon this platform the venders were wont to display their goods—newly-killed beef, fish, crabs, fruit of the country, cassava, eggs, dulces and high, tottering stacks of native tortillas as large around as the sombrero of a Spanish grandee.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-robe-of-peace" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-robe-of-peace" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Robe of Peace</h2>
|
||||
<p>Mysteries follow one another so closely in a great city that the reading public and the friends of Johnny Bellchambers have ceased to marvel at his sudden and unexplained disappearance nearly a year ago. This particular mystery has now been cleared up, but the solution is so strange and incredible to the mind of the average man that only a select few who were in close touch with Bellchambers will give it full credence.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnny Bellchambers, as is well known, belonged to the intrinsically inner circle of the élite. Without any of the ostentation of the fashionable ones who endeavor to attract notice by eccentric display of wealth and show he still was au fait in everything that gave deserved lustre to his high position in the ranks of society.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-rose-of-dixie" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-rose-of-dixie" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">“The Rose of Dixie”</h2>
|
||||
<p>When <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> magazine was started by a stock company in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family, reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the enterprise and the South should suffer by his possible refusal.</p>
|
||||
<p>The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair was seated at his massive white-pine centre-table, reading Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” He arose and shook hands punctiliously with each member of the committee. If you were familiar with <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rose of Dixie</i> you will remember the colonel’s portrait, which appeared in it from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-shamrock-and-the-palm" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-shamrock-and-the-palm" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Shamrock and the Palm</h2>
|
||||
<p>One night when there was no breeze, and Coralio seemed closer than ever to the gratings of Avernus, five men were grouped about the door of the photograph establishment of Keogh and Clancy. Thus, in all the scorched and exotic places of the earth, Caucasians meet when the day’s work is done to preserve the fullness of their heritage by the aspersion of alien things.</p>
|
||||
<p>Johnny Atwood lay stretched upon the grass in the undress uniform of a Carib, and prated feebly of cool water to be had in the cucumber-wood pumps of Dalesburg. <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Gregg, through the prestige of his whiskers and as a bribe against the relation of his imminent professional tales, was conceded the hammock that was swung between the door jamb and a calabash-tree. Keogh had moved out upon the grass a little table that held the instrument for burnishing completed photographs. He was the only busy one of the group. Industriously from between the cylinders of the burnisher rolled the finished depictments of Coralio’s citizens. Blanchard, the French mining engineer, in his cool linen viewed the smoke of his cigarette through his calm glasses, impervious to the heat. Clancy sat on the steps, smoking his short pipe. His mood was the gossip’s; the others were reduced, by the humidity, to the state of disability desirable in an audience.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-sphinx-apple" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-sphinx-apple" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Sphinx Apple</h2>
|
||||
<p>Twenty miles out from Paradise, and fifteen miles short of Sunrise City, Bildad Rose, the stage-driver, stopped his team. A furious snow had been falling all day. Eight inches it measured now, on a level. The remainder of the road was not without peril in daylight, creeping along the ribs of a bijou range of ragged mountains. Now, when both snow and night masked its dangers, further travel was not to be thought of, said Bildad Rose. So he pulled up his four stout horses, and delivered to his five passengers oral deductions of his wisdom.</p>
|
||||
<p>Judge Menefee, to whom men granted leadership and the initiatory as upon a silver salver, sprang from the coach at once. Four of his fellow-passengers followed, inspired by his example, ready to explore, to objurgate, to resist, to submit, to proceed, according as their prime factor might be inclined to sway them. The fifth passenger, a young woman, remained in the coach.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-things-the-play" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-things-the-play" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Thing’s the Play</h2>
|
||||
<p>Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses.</p>
|
||||
<p>One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-third-ingredient" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-third-ingredient" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Third Ingredient</h2>
|
||||
<p>The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa’s roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the door-bell rings.</p>
|
||||
<p>This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians—though meaning no disrespect to the others.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-unknown-quantity" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-unknown-quantity" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Unknown Quantity</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-venturers" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-venturers" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Venturers</h2>
|
||||
<p>Let the story wreck itself on the spreading rails of the <i epub:type="se:name.vehicle.train">Non Sequitur</i> Limited, if it will; first you must take your seat in the observation car “<i xml:lang="fr">Raison d’être</i>” for one moment. It is for no longer than to consider a brief essay on the subject—let us call it: “What’s Around the Corner.”</p>
|
||||
<p><i xml:lang="la">Omne mundus in duas partes divisum est</i>—men who wear rubbers and pay poll-taxes, and men who discover new continents. There are no more continents to discover; but by the time overshoes are out of date and the poll has developed into an income tax, the other half will be paralleling the canals of Mars with radium railways.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="the-vitagraphoscope" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="the-vitagraphoscope" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">The Vitagraphoscope</h2>
|
||||
<p>Vaudeville is intrinsically episodic and discontinuous. Its audiences do not demand dénoûements. Sufficient unto each “turn” is the evil thereof. No one cares how many romances the singing comédienne may have had if she can capably sustain the limelight and a high note or two. The audiences reck not if the performing dogs get to the pound the moment they have jumped through their last hoop. They do not desire bulletins about the possible injuries received by the comic bicyclist who retires headfirst from the stage in a crash of (property) chinaware. Neither do they consider that their seat coupons entitle them to be instructed whether or no there is a sentiment between the lady solo banjoist and the Irish monologist.</p>
|
||||
<p>Therefore let us have no lifting of the curtain upon a tableau of the united lovers, backgrounded by defeated villainy and derogated by the comic, osculating maid and butler, thrown in as a sop to the Cerberi of the fifty-cent seats.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="thimble-thimble" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="thimble-thimble" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Thimble, Thimble</h2>
|
||||
<p>These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret & Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:</p>
|
||||
<p>You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Cañons of the Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton four-horse dray and hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities—to say nothing of Brooklyn—not being of interest to you, let us hold the incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret & Carteret’s office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man, the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question—mostly borrowed from the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="to-him-who-waits" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="to-him-who-waits" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">To Him Who Waits</h2>
|
||||
<p>The Hermit of the Hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual animation.</p>
|
||||
<p>The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills that had strayed down to the river’s edge, and, not having a ferry ticket, had to stop there. The bijou mountains were densely wooded and were infested by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced the summer transients. Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a macadamized road ran between the green skirt of the hills and the foamy lace of the river’s edge. A dim path wound from the comfortable road up a rocky height to the hermit’s cave. One mile upstream was the Viewpoint Inn, to which summer folk from the city came; leaving cool, electric-fanned apartments that they might be driven about in burning sunshine, shrieking, in gasoline launches, by spindle-legged Modreds bearing the blankest of shields.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="two-recalls" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="two-recalls" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Two Recalls</h2>
|
||||
<p>There remains three duties to be performed before the curtain falls upon the patched comedy. Two have been promised: the third is no less obligatory.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was set forth in the programme of this tropic vaudeville that it would be made known why Shorty O’Day, of the Columbia Detective Agency, lost his position. Also that Smith should come again to tell us what mystery he followed that night on the shores of Anchuria when he strewed so many cigar stumps around the coconut palm during his lonely night vigil on the beach. These things were promised; but a bigger thing yet remains to be accomplished—the clearing up of a seeming wrong that has been done according to the array of chronicled facts (truthfully set forth) that have been presented. And one voice, speaking, shall do these three things.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="what-you-want" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<section id="what-you-want" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">“What You Want”</h2>
|
||||
<p>Night had fallen on that great and beautiful city known as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. And with the night came the enchanted glamour that belongs not to Arabia alone. In different masquerade the streets, bazaars and walled houses of the occidental city of romance were filled with the same kind of folk that so much interested our interesting old friend, the late <abbr>Mr.</abbr> H. A. Rashid. They wore clothes eleven hundred years nearer to the latest styles than H. A. saw in old Bagdad; but they were about the same people underneath. With the eye of faith, you could have seen the Little Hunchback, Sinbad the Sailor, Fitbad the Tailor, the Beautiful Persian, the one-eyed Calenders, Ali Baba and Forty Robbers on every block, and the Barber and his Six Brothers, and all the old Arabian gang easily.</p>
|
||||
<p>But let us revenue to our lamb chops.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user