[Stones] Semanticate
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<p><span class="xlarge"><b>THE ROLLING STONE</b></span>is a weekly paper published in Austin, Texasevery Saturday and will endeavor to fill along-felt want that does not appear,by the way, to be altogether in-satiable at present.<b>THE IDEA IS</b>to fill its pages with matter that will make aheart-rending appeal to every lover ofgood literature, and every person whohas a taste for reading print;and a dollar and a half fora year’s subscription.<b>OUR SPECIAL PREMIUM</b>For the next thirty days and from that timeon indefinitely, whoever will bring two dol-lars in cash to <i>The Rolling Stone</i> officewill be entered on the list of sub-scribers for one year and willhave returned to himon the spot<b>FIFTY CENTS IN CASH</b></p>
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<h5>The editor’s own statement of his aims</h5>
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<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
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<h2 epub:type="title">INTRODUCTION</h2>
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<p>This the twelfth and final volume of O. Henry’s work gets its title from an early newspaper venture of which he was the head and front. On April 28, 1894, there appeared in Austin, Texas, volume 1, number 3, of <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, with a circulation greatly in excess of that of the only two numbers that had gone before. Apparently the business office was encouraged. The first two issues of one thousand copies each had been bought up. Of the third an edition of six thousand was published and distributed <i>free</i>, so that the business men of Austin, Texas, might know what a good medium was at hand for their advertising. The editor and proprietor and illustrator of <i>The Rolling Stone</i> was Will Porter, incidentally Paying and Receiving Teller in Major Brackenridge’s bank.</p>
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<p>Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the paper was “The Plunkville Patriot,” a page each week—or at least with the regularity of the somewhat uncertain paper itself—purporting to be reprinted from a contemporary journal. The editor of the Plunkville <i>Patriot</i> was Colonel Aristotle Jordan, unrelenting enemy of his enemies. When the Colonel’s application for the postmastership in Plunkville is ignored, his columns carry a bitter attack on the administration at Washington. With the public weal at heart, the <i>Patriot</i> announces that “there is a dangerous hole in the front steps of the Elite saloon.” Here, too, appears the delightful literary item that Mark Twain and Charles Egbert Craddock are spending the summer together in their Adirondacks camp. “Free,” runs its advertising column, “a clergyman who cured himself of fits will send one book containing 100 popular songs, one repeating rifle, two decks easywinner cards and 1 liver pad free of charge for $8. Address Sucker & Chump, Augusta, Me.” The office moves nearly every week, probably in accordance with the time-honored principle involving the comparative ease of moving and paying rent. When the Colonel publishes his own candidacy for mayor, he further declares that the <i>Patriot</i> will accept no announcements for municipal offices until after “our” (the editor’s) canvass. Adams & Co., grocers, order their $2.25 ad. discontinued and find later in the <i>Patriot</i> this estimate of their product: “No less than three children have been poisoned by eating their canned vegetables, and J. O. Adams, the senior member of the firm, was run out of Kansas City for adulterating codfish balls. It pays to advertise.” Here is the editorial in which the editor first announces his campaign: “Our worthy mayor, Colonel Henry Stutty, died this morning after an illness of about five minutes, brought on by carrying a bouquet to Mrs. Eli Watts just as Eli got in from a fishing trip. Ten minutes later we had dodgers out announcing our candidacy for the office. We have lived in Plunkville going on five years and have never been elected anything yet. We understand the mayor business thoroughly and if elected some people will wish wolves had stolen them from their cradles …”</p>
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<p>Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the paper was “The Plunkville Patriot,” a page each week—or at least with the regularity of the somewhat uncertain paper itself—purporting to be reprinted from a contemporary journal. The editor of the Plunkville <i>Patriot</i> was Colonel Aristotle Jordan, unrelenting enemy of his enemies. When the Colonel’s application for the postmastership in Plunkville is ignored, his columns carry a bitter attack on the administration at Washington. With the public weal at heart, the <i>Patriot</i> announces that “there is a dangerous hole in the front steps of the Elite saloon.” Here, too, appears the delightful literary item that Mark Twain and Charles Egbert Craddock are spending the summer together in their Adirondacks camp. “Free,” runs its advertising column, “a clergyman who cured himself of fits will send one book containing 100 popular songs, one repeating rifle, two decks easywinner cards and 1 liver pad free of charge for $8. Address Sucker & Chump, Augusta, Me.” The office moves nearly every week, probably in accordance with the time-honored principle involving the comparative ease of moving and paying rent. When the Colonel publishes his own candidacy for mayor, he further declares that the <i>Patriot</i> will accept no announcements for municipal offices until after “our” (the editor’s) canvass. Adams & <abbr>Co.</abbr>, grocers, order their $2.25 ad. discontinued and find later in the <i>Patriot</i> this estimate of their product: “No less than three children have been poisoned by eating their canned vegetables, and J. O. Adams, the senior member of the firm, was run out of Kansas City for adulterating codfish balls. It pays to advertise.” Here is the editorial in which the editor first announces his campaign: “Our worthy mayor, Colonel Henry Stutty, died this morning after an illness of about five minutes, brought on by carrying a bouquet to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Eli Watts just as Eli got in from a fishing trip. Ten minutes later we had dodgers out announcing our candidacy for the office. We have lived in Plunkville going on five years and have never been elected anything yet. We understand the mayor business thoroughly and if elected some people will wish wolves had stolen them from their cradles …”</p>
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<p>The page from the <i>Patriot</i> is presented with an array of perfectly confused type, of artistic errors in setting up, and when an occasional line gets shifted (intentionally, of course) the effect is alarming. Anybody who knows the advertising of a small country weekly can, as he reads, pick out, in the following, the advertisement from the “personal.”</p>
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<td> Miss Hattie Green of Paris, Ill., isSteel-riveted seam or water powerautomatic oiling thoroughly testedvisiting her sister Mrs. G. W. GrubesLittle Giant Engines at Adams & Co.Also Sachet powders Mc. Cormick Reapers andoysters. </td>
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<td> Miss Hattie Green of Paris, Ill., isSteel-riveted seam or water powerautomatic oiling thoroughly testedvisiting her sister <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> G. W. GrubesLittle Giant Engines at Adams & <abbr>Co.</abbr>Also Sachet powders Mc. Cormick Reapers andoysters. </td>
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<p>All of this was a part of <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, which flourished, or at least wavered, in Austin during the years 1894 and 1895. Years before, Porter’s strong instinct to write had been gratified in letters. He wrote, in his twenties, long imaginative letters, occasionally stuffed with execrable puns, but more than often buoyant, truly humorous, keenly incisive into the unreal, especially in fiction. I have included a number of these letters to Doctor Beall of Greensboro, N. C., and to his early friend in Texas, Mr. David Harrell.</p>
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<p>All of this was a part of <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, which flourished, or at least wavered, in Austin during the years 1894 and 1895. Years before, Porter’s strong instinct to write had been gratified in letters. He wrote, in his twenties, long imaginative letters, occasionally stuffed with execrable puns, but more than often buoyant, truly humorous, keenly incisive into the unreal, especially in fiction. I have included a number of these letters to Doctor Beall of Greensboro, N. C., and to his early friend in Texas, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> David Harrell.</p>
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<p>In 1895–1896 Porter went to Houston, Texas, to work on the Houston <i>Post</i>. There he “conducted” a column which he called “Postscripts.” Some of the contents of the pages that follow have been taken from these old files in the fair hope that admirers of the matured O. Henry will find in them pleasurable marks of the later genius.</p>
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<p>Before the days of <i>The Rolling Stone</i> there are eleven years in Texas over which, with the exception of the letters mentioned, there are few “traces” of literary performance; but there are some very interesting drawings, some of which are reproduced in this volume. A story is back of them. They were the illustrations to a book. “Joe” Dixon, prospector and inveterate fortune-seeker, came to Austin from the Rockies in 1883, at the constant urging of his old pal, Mr. John Maddox, “Joe,” kept writing Mr. Maddox, “your fortune’s in your pen, not your pick. Come to Austin and write an account of your adventures.” It was hard to woo Dixon from the gold that wasn’t there, but finally Maddox wrote him he must come and try the scheme. “There’s a boy here from North Carolina,” wrote Maddox. “His name is Will Porter and he can make the pictures. He’s all right.” Dixon came. The plan was that, after Author and Artist had done their work, Patron would step in, carry the manuscript to New York, bestow it on a deserving publisher and then return to await, with the other two, the avalanche of royalties. This version of the story comes from Mr. Maddox. There were forty pictures in all and they were very true to the life of the Rockies in the seventies. Of course, the young artist had no “technique”—no anything except what was native. But wait! As the months went by Dixon worked hard, but he began to have doubts. Perhaps the book was no good. Perhaps John would only lose his money. He was a miner, not a writer, and he ought not to let John go to any expense. The result of this line of thought was the Colorado River for the manuscript and the high road for the author. The pictures, fortunately, were saved. Most of them Porter gave later to Mrs. Hagelstein of San Angelo, Texas. Mr. Maddox, by the way, finding a note from Joe that “explained all,” hastened to the river and recovered a few scraps of the great book that had lodged against a sandbar. But there was no putting them together again.</p>
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<p>Before the days of <i>The Rolling Stone</i> there are eleven years in Texas over which, with the exception of the letters mentioned, there are few “traces” of literary performance; but there are some very interesting drawings, some of which are reproduced in this volume. A story is back of them. They were the illustrations to a book. “Joe” Dixon, prospector and inveterate fortune-seeker, came to Austin from the Rockies in 1883, at the constant urging of his old pal, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> John Maddox, “Joe,” kept writing <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Maddox, “your fortune’s in your pen, not your pick. Come to Austin and write an account of your adventures.” It was hard to woo Dixon from the gold that wasn’t there, but finally Maddox wrote him he must come and try the scheme. “There’s a boy here from North Carolina,” wrote Maddox. “His name is Will Porter and he can make the pictures. He’s all right.” Dixon came. The plan was that, after Author and Artist had done their work, Patron would step in, carry the manuscript to New York, bestow it on a deserving publisher and then return to await, with the other two, the avalanche of royalties. This version of the story comes from <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Maddox. There were forty pictures in all and they were very true to the life of the Rockies in the seventies. Of course, the young artist had no “technique”—no anything except what was native. But wait! As the months went by Dixon worked hard, but he began to have doubts. Perhaps the book was no good. Perhaps John would only lose his money. He was a miner, not a writer, and he ought not to let John go to any expense. The result of this line of thought was the Colorado River for the manuscript and the high road for the author. The pictures, fortunately, were saved. Most of them Porter gave later to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Hagelstein of San Angelo, Texas. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Maddox, by the way, finding a note from Joe that “explained all,” hastened to the river and recovered a few scraps of the great book that had lodged against a sandbar. But there was no putting them together again.</p>
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<p>So much for the title. It is a real O. Henry title. Contents of this last volume are drawn not only from letters, old newspaper files, and <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, but from magazines and unpublished manuscripts. Of the short stories, several were written at the very height of his powers and popularity and were lost, inexplicably, but lost. Of the poems, there are a few whose authorship might have been in doubt if the compiler of this collection had not secured external evidence that made them certainly the work of O. Henry. Without this very strong evidence, they might have been rejected because they were not entirely the kind of poems the readers of O. Henry would expect from him. Most of them however, were found in his own indubitable manuscript or over his own signature.</p>
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<p>There is extant a mass of O. Henry correspondence that has not been included in this collection. During the better part of a decade in New York City he wrote constantly to editors, and in many instances intimately. This is very important material, and permission has been secured to use nearly all of it in a biographical volume that will be issued within the next two or three years. The letters in this volume have been chosen as an “exihibit,” as early specimens of his writing and for their particularly characteristic turns of thought and phrase. The collection is not “complete” in any historical sense.</p>
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<p>1912.<span class="ind20">H.P.S.</span></p>
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<p>1912.<span class="ind20">H.<abbr>P.S.</abbr></span></p>
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<section id="chapter-10" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>A DINNER AT–––– <a name="footnotetag3"/><a href="#footnote3">[3]</a></h2>
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<blockquote class="small">
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<p class="noindent">[The story referred to in this skit appears in “The Trimmed Lamp” under the same title—“The Badge of Policeman O’Roon.”]</p>
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<p class="noindent">
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<span class="smallcaps">The Adventures of an Author With His Own Hero</span>
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<section id="chapter-10" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<header>
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<h2 epub:type="title">A DINNER AT ⸻<a href="#footnote3">[3]</a></h2>
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<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
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<p>The story referred to in this skit appears in “The Trimmed Lamp” under the same title—“The Badge of Policeman O’Roon.”</p>
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</blockquote>
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<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
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<p>The Adventures of an Author With His Own Hero</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>All that day—in fact from the moment of his creation—Van Sweller had conducted himself fairly well in my eyes. Of course I had had to make many concessions; but in return he had been no less considerate. Once or twice we had had sharp, brief contentions over certain points of behavior; but, prevailingly, give and take had been our rule.</p>
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<p>His morning toilet provoked our first tilt. Van Sweller went about it confidently.</p>
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<p>“The usual thing, I suppose, old chap,” he said, with a smile and a yawn. “I ring for a b. and s., and then I have my tub. I splash a good deal in the water, of course. You are aware that there are two ways in which I can receive Tommy Carmichael when he looks in to have a chat about polo. I can talk to him through the bathroom door, or I can be picking at a grilled bone which my man has brought in. Which would you prefer?”</p>
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<p>Van Sweller slightly elevated his brows.</p>
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<p>“Oh, very well,” he said, a trifle piqued. “I rather imagine it concerns you more than it does me. Cut the ‘tub’ by all means, if you think best. But it has been the usual thing, you know.”</p>
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<p>This was my victory; but after Van Sweller emerged from his apartments in the “Beaujolie” I was vanquished in a dozen small but well-contested skirmishes. I allowed him a cigar; but routed him on the question of naming its brand. But he worsted me when I objected to giving him a “coat unmistakably English in its cut.” I allowed him to “stroll down Broadway,” and even permitted “passers by” (God knows there’s nowhere to pass but by) to “turn their heads and gaze with evident admiration at his erect figure.” I demeaned myself, and, as a barber, gave him a “smooth, dark face with its keen, frank eye, and firm jaw.”</p>
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<p>Later on he looked in at the club and saw Freddy Vavasour, polo team captain, dawdling over grilled bone No. 1.</p>
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<p>Later on he looked in at the club and saw Freddy Vavasour, polo team captain, dawdling over grilled bone <abbr>No.</abbr> 1.</p>
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<p>“Dear old boy,” began Van Sweller; but in an instant I had seized him by the collar and dragged him aside with the scantiest courtesy.</p>
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<p>“For heaven’s sake talk like a man,” I said, sternly. “Do you think it is manly to use those mushy and inane forms of address? That man is neither dear nor old nor a boy.”</p>
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<p>To my surprise Van Sweller turned upon me a look of frank pleasure.</p>
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<p>“Very well,” I answered, without giving him a clew to my suspicions; “I will go with you to your rooms and see that you do the thing properly. I suppose that every author must be a valet to his own hero.”</p>
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<p>He affected cheerful acceptance of my somewhat officious proposal to accompany him. I could see that he was annoyed by it, and that fact fastened deeper in my mind the conviction that he was meditating some act of treachery.</p>
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<p>When he had reached his apartments he said to me, with a too patronizing air: “There are, as you perhaps know, quite a number of little distinguishing touches to be had out of the dressing process. Some writers rely almost wholly upon them. I suppose that I am to ring for my man, and that he is to enter noiselessly, with an expressionless countenance.”</p>
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<p>“He may enter,” I said, with decision, “and only enter. Valets do not usually enter a room shouting college songs or with St. Vitus’s dance in their faces; so the contrary may be assumed without fatuous or gratuitous asseveration.”</p>
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<p>“He may enter,” I said, with decision, “and only enter. Valets do not usually enter a room shouting college songs or with <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus’s dance in their faces; so the contrary may be assumed without fatuous or gratuitous asseveration.”</p>
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<p>“I must ask you to pardon me,” continued Van Sweller, gracefully, “for annoying you with questions, but some of your methods are a little new to me. Shall I don a full-dress suit with an immaculate white tie—or is there another tradition to be upset?”</p>
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<p>“You will wear,” I replied, “evening dress, such as a gentleman wears. If it is full, your tailor should be responsible for its bagginess. And I will leave it to whatever erudition you are supposed to possess whether a white tie is rendered any whiter by being immaculate. And I will leave it to the consciences of you and your man whether a tie that is not white, and therefore not immaculate, could possibly form any part of a gentleman’s evening dress. If not, then the perfect tie is included and understood in the term ‘dress,’ and its expressed addition predicates either a redundancy of speech or the spectacle of a man wearing two ties at once.”</p>
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<p>With this mild but deserved rebuke I left Van Sweller in his dressing-room, and waited for him in his library.</p>
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<span class="ind15">Very truly yours,</span>
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<span class="ind15"><span class="smallcaps">The Editors</span>.</span>
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="chapter">
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<h2>SOUND AND FURY</h2>
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<blockquote class="small">
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<p class="noindent">[O. Henry wrote this for <i>Ainslee’s Magazine</i>, where it appeared in March, 1903.]</p>
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<div class="center">
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<section id="chapter-11" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
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<header>
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<h2 epub:type="title">SOUND AND FURY</h2>
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<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
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<p>O. Henry wrote this for <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Ainslee’s Magazine</i>, where it appeared in March, 1903.</p>
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<p class="noindent">PERSONS OF THE DRAMA</p>
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<span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span>
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<span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span>
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<td align="right">
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<i>An Author</i>
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<p class="noindent"><span class="smallcaps"><span class="xlarge">Scene</span></span>—<i>Workroom of</i> Mr. Penne’s <i>popular novel factory</i>.</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span>—Good morning, Miss Lore. Glad to see you so prompt. We should finish that June installment for the <i>Epoch</i> to-day. Leverett is crowding me for it. Are you quite ready? We will resume where we left off yesterday. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Kate, with a sigh, rose from his knees, and—”</p>
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<p class="noindent"><span class="smallcaps"><span class="xlarge">Scene</span></span>—<i>Workroom of</i> <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne’s <i>popular novel factory</i>.</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span>—Good morning, Miss Lore. Glad to see you so prompt. We should finish that June installment for the <i>Epoch</i> to-day. Leverett is crowding me for it. Are you quite ready? We will resume where we left off yesterday. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Kate, with a sigh, rose from his knees, and—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Excuse me; you mean “rose from <i>her</i> knees,” instead of “his,” don’t you?</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span>—Er—no—“his,” if you please. It is the love scene in the garden. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Rose from his knees where, blushing with youth’s bewitching coyness, she had rested for a moment after Cortland had declared his love. The hour was one of supreme and tender joy. When Kate—scene that Cortland never—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span>—Er—no—“his,” if you please. It is the love scene in the garden. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Rose from his knees where, blushing with youth’s bewitching coyness, she had rested for a moment after Cortland had declared his love. The hour was one of supreme and tender joy. When Kate—scene that Cortland never—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Excuse me; but wouldn’t it be more grammatical to say “when Kate <i>saw</i>,” instead of “seen”?</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span>—The context will explain. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “When Kate—scene that Cortland never forgot—came tripping across the lawn it seemed to him the fairest sight that earth had ever offered to his gaze.”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span>—The context will explain. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “When Kate—scene that Cortland never forgot—came tripping across the lawn it seemed to him the fairest sight that earth had ever offered to his gaze.”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“Kate had abandoned herself to the joy of her new-found love so completely, that no shadow of her former grief was cast upon it. Cortland, with his arm firmly entwined about her waist, knew nothing of her sighs—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“Kate had abandoned herself to the joy of her new-found love so completely, that no shadow of her former grief was cast upon it. Cortland, with his arm firmly entwined about her waist, knew nothing of her sighs—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Goodness! If he couldn’t tell her size with his arm around—</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>frowning</i>)—“Of her sighs and tears of the previous night.”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>frowning</i>)—“Of her sighs and tears of the previous night.”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“To Cortland the chief charm of this girl was her look of innocence and unworldiness. Never had nun—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“To Cortland the chief charm of this girl was her look of innocence and unworldiness. Never had nun—”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—How about changing that to “never had any?”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>emphatically</i>)—“Never had nun in cloistered cell a face more sweet and pure.”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>emphatically</i>)—“Never had nun in cloistered cell a face more sweet and pure.”</p>
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<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“But now Kate must hasten back to the house lest her absence be discovered. After a fond farewell she turned and sped lightly away. Cortland’s gaze followed her. He watched her rise—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Excuse me, Mr. Penne; but how could he watch her eyes while her back was turned toward him?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>with extreme politeness</i>)—Possibly you would gather my meaning more intelligently if you would wait for the conclusion of the sentence. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Watched her rise as gracefully as a fawn as she mounted the eastern terrace.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“But now Kate must hasten back to the house lest her absence be discovered. After a fond farewell she turned and sped lightly away. Cortland’s gaze followed her. He watched her rise—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Excuse me, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne; but how could he watch her eyes while her back was turned toward him?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>with extreme politeness</i>)—Possibly you would gather my meaning more intelligently if you would wait for the conclusion of the sentence. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Watched her rise as gracefully as a fawn as she mounted the eastern terrace.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“And yet Cortland’s position was so far above that of this rustic maiden that he dreaded to consider the social upheaval that would ensue should he marry her. In no uncertain tones the traditional voices of his caste and world cried out loudly to him to let her go. What should follow—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span> (<i>looking up with a start</i>)—I’m sure I can’t say, Mr. Penne. Unless (<i>with a giggle</i>) you would want to add “Gallegher.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>coldly</i>)—Pardon me. I was not seeking to impose upon you the task of a collaborator. Kindly consider the question a part of the text.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“And yet Cortland’s position was so far above that of this rustic maiden that he dreaded to consider the social upheaval that would ensue should he marry her. In no uncertain tones the traditional voices of his caste and world cried out loudly to him to let her go. What should follow—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span> (<i>looking up with a start</i>)—I’m sure I can’t say, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne. Unless (<i>with a giggle</i>) you would want to add “Gallegher.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>coldly</i>)—Pardon me. I was not seeking to impose upon you the task of a collaborator. Kindly consider the question a part of the text.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“On one side was love and Kate; on the other side his heritage of social position and family pride. Would love win? Love, that the poets tell us will last forever! (<i>Perceives that Miss Lore looks fatigued, and looks at his watch.</i>) That’s a good long stretch. Perhaps we’d better knock off a bit.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“On one side was love and Kate; on the other side his heritage of social position and family pride. Would love win? Love, that the poets tell us will last forever! (<i>Perceives that Miss Lore looks fatigued, and looks at his watch.</i>) That’s a good long stretch. Perhaps we’d better knock off a bit.”</p>
|
||||
<p>(Miss Lore <i>does not reply</i>.)</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span>—I said, Miss Lore, we’ve been at it quite a long time—wouldn’t you like to knock off for a while?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span>—I said, Miss Lore, we’ve been at it quite a long time—wouldn’t you like to knock off for a while?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh! Were you addressing me before? I put what you said down. I thought it belonged in the story. It seemed to fit in all right. Oh, no; I’m not tired.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span>—Very well, then, we will continue. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “In spite of these qualms and doubts, Cortland was a happy man. That night at the club he silently toasted Kate’s bright eyes in a bumper of the rarest vintage. Afterward he set out for a stroll with, as Kate on—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Excuse me, Mr. Penne, for venturing a suggestion; but don’t you think you might state that in a less coarse manner?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>astounded</i>)—Wh-wh—I’m afraid I fail to understand you.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span>—Very well, then, we will continue. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “In spite of these qualms and doubts, Cortland was a happy man. That night at the club he silently toasted Kate’s bright eyes in a bumper of the rarest vintage. Afterward he set out for a stroll with, as Kate on—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Excuse me, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne, for venturing a suggestion; but don’t you think you might state that in a less coarse manner?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>astounded</i>)—Wh-wh—I’m afraid I fail to understand you.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—His condition. Why not say he was “full” or “intoxicated”? It would sound much more elegant than the way you express it.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>still darkly wandering</i>)—Will you kindly point out, Miss Lore, where I have intimated that Cortland was “full,” if you prefer that word?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>still darkly wandering</i>)—Will you kindly point out, Miss Lore, where I have intimated that Cortland was “full,” if you prefer that word?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span> (<i>calmly consulting her stenographic notes</i>)—It is right here, word for word. (Reads.) “Afterward he set out for a stroll with a skate on.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>with peculiar emphasis</i>)—Ah! And now will you kindly take down the expurgated phrase? (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Afterward he set out for a stroll with, as Kate on one occasion had fancifully told him, her spirit leaning upon his arm.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>with peculiar emphasis</i>)—Ah! And now will you kindly take down the expurgated phrase? (<i>Dictates</i>.) “Afterward he set out for a stroll with, as Kate on one occasion had fancifully told him, her spirit leaning upon his arm.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—Chapter thirty-four. Heading—“What Kate Found in the Garden.” “That fragrant summer morning brought gracious tasks to all. The bees were at the honeysuckle blossoms on the porch. Kate, singing a little song, was training the riotous branches of her favorite woodbine. The sun, himself, had rows—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—Chapter thirty-four. Heading—“What Kate Found in the Garden.” “That fragrant summer morning brought gracious tasks to all. The bees were at the honeysuckle blossoms on the porch. Kate, singing a little song, was training the riotous branches of her favorite woodbine. The sun, himself, had rows—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Shall I say “had risen”?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>very slowly and with desperate deliberation</i>)—“The—sun—himself—had—rows—of—blushing—pinks—and—hollyhocks—and—hyacinths—waiting—that—he—might—dry—their—dew-drenched—cups.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>very slowly and with desperate deliberation</i>)—“The—sun—himself—had—rows—of—blushing—pinks—and—hollyhocks—and—hyacinths—waiting—that—he—might—dry—their—dew-drenched—cups.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“The earliest trolley, scattering the birds from its pathway like some marauding cat, brought Cortland over from Oldport. He had forgotten his fair—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“The earliest trolley, scattering the birds from its pathway like some marauding cat, brought Cortland over from Oldport. He had forgotten his fair—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Hm! Wonder how he got the conductor to—</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>very loudly</i>)—“Forgotten his fair and roseate visions of the night in the practical light of the sober morn.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>very loudly</i>)—“Forgotten his fair and roseate visions of the night in the practical light of the sober morn.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“He greeted her with his usual smile and manner. ‘See the waves,’ he cried, pointing to the heaving waters of the sea, ‘ever wooing and returning to the rockbound shore.’ ” “ ‘Ready to break,’ Kate said, with—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“He greeted her with his usual smile and manner. ‘See the waves,’ he cried, pointing to the heaving waters of the sea, ‘ever wooing and returning to the rockbound shore.’ ” “ ‘Ready to break,’ Kate said, with—”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—My! One evening he has his arm around her, and the next morning he’s ready to break her head! Just like a man!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>with suspicious calmness</i>)—There are times, Miss Lore, when a man becomes so far exasperated that even a woman—But suppose we finish the sentence. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “ ‘Ready to break,’ Kate said, with the thrilling look of a soul-awakened woman, ‘into foam and spray, destroying themselves upon the shore they love so well.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>with suspicious calmness</i>)—There are times, Miss Lore, when a man becomes so far exasperated that even a woman—But suppose we finish the sentence. (<i>Dictates</i>.) “ ‘Ready to break,’ Kate said, with the thrilling look of a soul-awakened woman, ‘into foam and spray, destroying themselves upon the shore they love so well.”</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Oh!</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“Cortland, in Kate’s presence heard faintly the voice of caution. Thirty years had not cooled his ardor. It was in his power to bestow great gifts upon this girl. He still retained the beliefs that he had at twenty.” (<i>To Miss Lore, wearily</i>) I think that will be enough for the present.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>dictates</i>)—“Cortland, in Kate’s presence heard faintly the voice of caution. Thirty years had not cooled his ardor. It was in his power to bestow great gifts upon this girl. He still retained the beliefs that he had at twenty.” (<i>To Miss Lore, wearily</i>) I think that will be enough for the present.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span> (<i>wisely</i>)—Well, if he had the twenty that he believed he had, it might buy her a rather nice one.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>faintly</i>)—The last sentence was my own. We will discontinue for the day, Miss Lore.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>faintly</i>)—The last sentence was my own. We will discontinue for the day, Miss Lore.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Miss Lore</span>—Shall I come again to-morrow?</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps">Mr. Penne</span> (<i>helpless under the spell</i>)—If you will be so good.</p>
|
||||
<p><span class="smallcaps"><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Penne</span> (<i>helpless under the spell</i>)—If you will be so good.</p>
|
||||
<p>(<i>Exit</i> Miss Lore.)</p>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">ASBESTOS CURTAIN</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,30 +6,31 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>TICTOCQ</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[These two farcical stories about Tictocq appeared in <i>The Rolling Stone</i>. They are reprinted here with all of their local references because, written hurriedly and for neighborly reading, they nevertheless have an interest for the admirer of O. Henry. They were written in 1894.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-12" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">TICTOCQ</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>These two farcical stories about Tictocq appeared in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>. They are reprinted here with all of their local references because, written hurriedly and for neighborly reading, they nevertheless have an interest for the admirer of O. Henry. They were written in 1894.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<div class="center">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">THE GREAT FRENCH DETECTIVE, IN AUSTIN</p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<i>A Successful Political Intrigue</i>
|
||||
<h4>CHAPTER I</h4>
|
||||
<section id="tictocq-1 epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<p>One report is that the French Minister of State has discovered an old statute among the laws of the empire, resulting from a treaty between the Emperor Charlemagne and Governor Roberts which expressly provides for the north gate of the Capital grounds being kept open, but this is merely a conjecture.</p>
|
||||
<p>Last Wednesday afternoon a well-dressed gentleman knocked at the door of Tictocq’s room in the hotel.</p>
|
||||
<p>The detective opened the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Monsieur Tictocq, I believe,” said the gentleman.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You will see on the register that I sign my name Q. X. Jones,” said Tictocq, “and gentlemen would understand that I wish to be known as such. If you do not like being referred to as no gentleman, I will give you satisfaction any time after July 1st, and fight Steve O’Donnell, John McDonald, and Ignatius Donnelly in the meantime if you desire.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not mind it in the least,” said the gentleman. “In fact, I am accustomed to it. I am Chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, Platform No. 2, and I have a friend in trouble. I knew you were Tictocq from your resemblance to yourself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You will see on the register that I sign my name Q. <span epub:type="z3998:roman">X</span>. Jones,” said Tictocq, “and gentlemen would understand that I wish to be known as such. If you do not like being referred to as no gentleman, I will give you satisfaction any time after July 1st, and fight Steve O’Donnell, John McDonald, and Ignatius Donnelly in the meantime if you desire.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I do not mind it in the least,” said the gentleman. “In fact, I am accustomed to it. I am Chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, Platform <abbr>No.</abbr> 2, and I have a friend in trouble. I knew you were Tictocq from your resemblance to yourself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Entrez vous,” said the detective.</p>
|
||||
<p>The gentleman entered and was handed a chair.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a man of few words,” said Tictoq. “I will help your friend if possible. Our countries are great friends. We have given you Lafayette and French fried potatoes. You have given us California champagne and—taken back Ward McAllister. State your case.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I will be very brief,” said the visitor. “In room No. 76 in this hotel is stopping a prominent Populist Candidate. He is alone. Last night some one stole his socks. They cannot be found. If they are not recovered, his party will attribute their loss to the Democracy. They will make great capital of the burglary, although I am sure it was not a political move at all. The socks must be recovered. You are the only man that can do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I will be very brief,” said the visitor. “In room <abbr>No.</abbr> 76 in this hotel is stopping a prominent Populist Candidate. He is alone. Last night some one stole his socks. They cannot be found. If they are not recovered, his party will attribute their loss to the Democracy. They will make great capital of the burglary, although I am sure it was not a political move at all. The socks must be recovered. You are the only man that can do it.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Tictocq bowed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Am I to have carte blanche to question every person connected with the hotel?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“The proprietor has already been spoken to. Everything and everybody is at your service.”</p>
|
||||
@ -53,16 +54,18 @@
|
||||
<p>“What is your name?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Jim.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You can go.”</p>
|
||||
<h4>CHAPTER II</h4>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="tictocq-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Rutabaga St. Vitus, the hostess, is accustomed to draw around her a circle of talent, and beauty, rarely equalled anywhere. Her evenings come nearer approaching the dignity of a salon than any occasion, except, perhaps, a Tony Faust and Marguerite reception at the Iron Front.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss St. Vitus, whose advent into society’s maze was heralded by such an auspicious display of hospitality, is a slender brunette, with large, lustrous eyes, a winning smile, and a charming ingénue manner. She wears a china silk, cut princesse, with diamond ornaments, and a couple of towels inserted in the back to conceal prominence of shoulder blades. She is chatting easily and naturally on a plush covered tête-à-tête with Harold St. Clair, the agent for a Minneapolis pants company. Her friend and schoolmate, Elsie Hicks, who married three drummers in one day, a week or two before, and won a wager of two dozen bottles of Budweiser from the handsome and talented young hack-driver, Bum Smithers, is promenading in and out the low French windows with Ethelbert Windup, the popular young candidate for hide inspector, whose name is familiar to every one who reads police court reports.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Rutabaga <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus, the hostess, is accustomed to draw around her a circle of talent, and beauty, rarely equalled anywhere. Her evenings come nearer approaching the dignity of a salon than any occasion, except, perhaps, a Tony Faust and Marguerite reception at the Iron Front.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus, whose advent into society’s maze was heralded by such an auspicious display of hospitality, is a slender brunette, with large, lustrous eyes, a winning smile, and a charming ingénue manner. She wears a china silk, cut princesse, with diamond ornaments, and a couple of towels inserted in the back to conceal prominence of shoulder blades. She is chatting easily and naturally on a plush covered tête-à-tête with Harold <abbr>St.</abbr> Clair, the agent for a Minneapolis pants company. Her friend and schoolmate, Elsie Hicks, who married three drummers in one day, a week or two before, and won a wager of two dozen bottles of Budweiser from the handsome and talented young hack-driver, Bum Smithers, is promenading in and out the low French windows with Ethelbert Windup, the popular young candidate for hide inspector, whose name is familiar to every one who reads police court reports.</p>
|
||||
<p>Somewhere, concealed by shrubbery, a band is playing, and during the pauses in conversation, onions can be smelt frying in the kitchen.</p>
|
||||
<p>Happy laughter rings out from ruby lips, handsome faces grow tender as they bend over white necks and drooping beads; timid eyes convey things that lips dare not speak, and beneath silken bodice and broadcloth, hearts beat time to the sweet notes of “Love’s Young Dream.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And where have you been for some time past, you recreant cavalier?” says Miss St. Vitus to Harold St. Clair. “Have you been worshipping at another shrine? Are you recreant to your whilom friends? Speak, Sir Knight, and defend yourself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“And where have you been for some time past, you recreant cavalier?” says Miss <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus to Harold <abbr>St.</abbr> Clair. “Have you been worshipping at another shrine? Are you recreant to your whilom friends? Speak, Sir Knight, and defend yourself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, come off,” says Harold, in his deep, musical baritone; “I’ve been having a devil of a time fitting pants on a lot of bow-legged jays from the cotton-patch. Got knobs on their legs, some of ’em big as gourds, and all expect a fit. Did you every try to measure a bow-legged—I mean—can’t you imagine what a jam-swizzled time I have getting pants to fit ’em? Business dull too, nobody wants ’em over three dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You witty boy,” says Miss St. Vitus. “Just as full of bon mots and clever sayings as ever. What do you take now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You witty boy,” says Miss <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus. “Just as full of bon mots and clever sayings as ever. What do you take now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, beer.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Give me your arm and let’s go into the drawing-room and draw a cork. I’m chewing a little cotton myself.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Arm in arm, the handsome couple pass across the room, the cynosure of all eyes. Luderic Hetherington, the rising and gifted night-watchman at the Lone Star slaughter house, and Mabel Grubb, the daughter of the millionaire owner of the Humped-backed Camel saloon, are standing under the oleanders as they go by.</p>
|
||||
@ -70,7 +73,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Rats,” says Mabel.</p>
|
||||
<p>A keen observer would have noted all this time the figure of a solitary man who seemed to avoid the company but by adroit changing of his position, and perfectly cool and self-possessed manner, avoided drawing any especial attention to himself.</p>
|
||||
<p>The lion of the evening is Herr Professor Ludwig von Bum, the pianist.</p>
|
||||
<p>He had been found drinking beer in a saloon on East Pecan Street by Colonel St. Vitus about a week before, and according to the Austin custom in such cases, was invited home by the colonel, and the next day accepted into society, with large music classes at his service.</p>
|
||||
<p>He had been found drinking beer in a saloon on East Pecan Street by Colonel <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus about a week before, and according to the Austin custom in such cases, was invited home by the colonel, and the next day accepted into society, with large music classes at his service.</p>
|
||||
<p>Professor von Bum is playing the lovely symphony in G minor from Beethoven’s “Songs Without Music.” The grand chords fill the room with exquisite harmony. He plays the extremely difficult passages in the obligato home run in a masterly manner, and when he finishes with that grand te deum with arpeggios on the side, there is that complete hush in the room that is dearer to the artist’s heart than the loudest applause.</p>
|
||||
<p>The professor looks around.</p>
|
||||
<p>The room is empty.</p>
|
||||
@ -83,12 +86,14 @@
|
||||
<p>“Ah, he confesses,” says Tictocq. “No socks will do but those you carried off from the Populist Candidate’s room.”</p>
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<h4>CHAPTER III</h4>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="tictocq-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h3 span 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>
|
||||
<p>Tictocq opens it and looks at his watch.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah,” he says, “it is just six. Entrez, Messieurs.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The messieurs entrez. There are seven of them; the Populist Candidate who is there by invitation, not knowing for what purpose; the chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, platform No. 2, the hotel proprietor, and three or four Democrats and Populists, as near as could be found out.</p>
|
||||
<p>The messieurs entrez. There are seven of them; the Populist Candidate who is there by invitation, not knowing for what purpose; the chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, platform <abbr>No.</abbr> 2, the hotel proprietor, and three or four Democrats and Populists, as near as could be found out.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t know,” begins the Populist Candidate, “what in the h––––”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Excuse me,” says Tictocq, firmly. “You will oblige me by keeping silent until I make my report. I have been employed in this case, and I have unravelled it. For the honor of France I request that I be heard with attention.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Certainly,” says the chairman; “we will be pleased to listen.”</p>
|
||||
@ -107,7 +112,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Once more I must beg that you will be silent,” said Tictocq, rather sharply. “You should not interrupt me in the midst of my report.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I made one false arrest,” continued Tictocq. “I was passing two finely dressed gentlemen on the street, when one of them remarked that he had ‘stole his socks.’ I handcuffed him and dragged him to a lighted store, when his companion explained to me that he was somewhat intoxicated and his tongue was not entirely manageable. He had been speaking of some business transaction, and what he intended to say was that he had ‘sold his stocks.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I then released him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“An hour afterward I passed a saloon, and saw this Professor von Bum drinking beer at a table. I knew him in Paris. I said ‘here is my man.’ He worshipped Wagner, lived on limburger cheese, beer, and credit, and would have stolen anybody’s socks. I shadowed him to the reception at Colonel St. Vitus’s, and in an opportune moment I seized him and tore the socks from his feet. There they are.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“An hour afterward I passed a saloon, and saw this Professor von Bum drinking beer at a table. I knew him in Paris. I said ‘here is my man.’ He worshipped Wagner, lived on limburger cheese, beer, and credit, and would have stolen anybody’s socks. I shadowed him to the reception at Colonel <abbr>St.</abbr> Vitus’s, and in an opportune moment I seized him and tore the socks from his feet. There they are.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a dramatic gesture, Tictocq threw a pair of dingy socks upon the table, folded his arms, and threw back his head.</p>
|
||||
<p>With a loud cry of rage, the Populist Candidate sprang once more to his feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Gol darn it! I WILL say what I want to. I—”</p>
|
||||
@ -120,7 +125,8 @@
|
||||
<p>The Populists turn their backs.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The damage is already done,” they said. “The people have heard the story. You have yet time to withdraw decently before the race.”</p>
|
||||
<p>All left the room except Tictocq and the Democrats.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let’s all go down and open a bottle of fizz on the Finance Committee,” said the Chairman of the Executive Committee, Platform No. 2.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Let’s all go down and open a bottle of fizz on the Finance Committee,” said the Chairman of the Executive Committee, Platform <abbr>No.</abbr> 2.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
</html>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,11 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-13" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>TRACKED TO DOOM</h2>
|
||||
<div class="center">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">ORTHE MYSTERY OF THE RUE DE PEYCHAUD</p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-13" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">TRACKED TO DOOM</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>ORTHE MYSTERY OF THE RUE DE PEYCHAUD</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>’Tis midnight in Paris.</p>
|
||||
<p>A myriad of lamps that line the Champs Elysées and the Rouge et Noir, cast their reflection in the dark waters of the Seine as it flows gloomily past the Place Vendôme and the black walls of the Convent Notadam.</p>
|
||||
<p>The great French capital is astir.</p>
|
||||
@ -27,7 +29,7 @@
|
||||
<p>His striped blouse is wide open at the neck and falls outside of his dingy leather trousers. The handle of a deadly looking knife protrudes from his belt. One stroke of its blade would open a box of the finest French sardines.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Voilà, Gray Wolf,” cries Couteau, the bartender. “How many victims to-day? There is no blood upon your hands. Has the Gray Wolf forgotten how to bite?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sacrè Bleu, Mille Tonnerre, by George,” hisses the Gray Wolf. “Monsieur Couteau, you are bold indeed to speak to me thus.</p>
|
||||
<p>“By Ventre St. Gris! I have not even dined to-day. Spoils indeed. There is no living in Paris now. But one rich American have I garroted in a fortnight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“By Ventre <abbr>St.</abbr> Gris! I have not even dined to-day. Spoils indeed. There is no living in Paris now. But one rich American have I garroted in a fortnight.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Bah! those Democrats. They have ruined the country. With their income tax and their free trade, they have destroyed the millionaire business. Carrambo! Diable! D––––n it!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Hist!” suddenly says Chamounix the rag-picker, who is worth 20,000,000 francs, “some one comes!”</p>
|
||||
<p>The cellar door opened and a man crept softly down the rickety steps. The crowd watches him with silent awe.</p>
|
||||
@ -81,7 +83,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Old François Beongfallong, the great astronomer, who is studying the sidereal spheres from his attic window in the Rue de Bologny, shudders as he turns his telescope upon the solitary figure upon the spire.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Sacrè Bleu!” he hisses between his new celluloid teeth. “It is Tictocq, the detective. I wonder whom he is following now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>While Tictocq is watching with lynx-like eyes the hill of Montmartre, he suddenly hears a heavy breathing beside him, and turning, gazes into the ferocious eyes of the Gray Wolf.</p>
|
||||
<p>Carnaignole Cusheau had put on his W. U. Tel. Co. climbers and climbed the steeple.</p>
|
||||
<p>Carnaignole Cusheau had put on his W. U. Tel. <abbr>Co.</abbr> climbers and climbed the steeple.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Parbleu, monsieur,” says Tictocq. “To whom am I indebted for the honor of this visit?”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Gray Wolf smiled softly and depreciatingly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You are Tictocq, the detective?” he said.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-14" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>A SNAPSHOT AT THE PRESIDENT</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[This is the kind of waggish editorial O. Henry was writing in 1894 for the readers of <i>The Rolling Stone</i>. The reader will do well to remember that the paper was for local consumption and that the allusions are to a very special place and time.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-14" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A SNAPSHOT AT THE PRESIDENT</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>This is the kind of waggish editorial O. Henry was writing in 1894 for the readers of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>. The reader will do well to remember that the paper was for local consumption and that the allusions are to a very special place and time.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p>(It will be remembered that about a month ago there were special rates offered to the public for a round trip to the City of Washington. The price of the ticket being exceedingly low, we secured a loan of twenty dollars from a public-spirited citizen of Austin, by mortgaging our press and cow, with the additional security of our brother’s name and a slight draught on Major Hutchinson for $4,000.</p>
|
||||
<p>We purchased a round trip ticket, two loaves of Vienna bread, and quite a large piece of cheese, which we handed to a member of our reportorial staff, with instructions to go to Washington, interview President Cleveland, and get a scoop, if possible, on all other Texas papers.</p>
|
||||
@ -29,19 +29,19 @@
|
||||
<p>I changed cars and shirts once only on the journey. A stranger wanted me to also change a two-dollar bill, but I haughtily declined.</p>
|
||||
<p>The scenery along the entire road to Washington is diversified. You find a portion of it on one hand by looking out of the window, and upon turning the gaze upon the other side the eye is surprised and delighted by discovering some more of it.</p>
|
||||
<p>There were a great many Knights of Pythias on the train. One of them insisted upon my giving him the grip I had with me, but he was unsuccessful.</p>
|
||||
<p>On arriving in Washington, which city I instantly recognized from reading the history of George, I left the car so hastily that I forgot to fee Mr. Pullman’s representative.</p>
|
||||
<p>On arriving in Washington, which city I instantly recognized from reading the history of George, I left the car so hastily that I forgot to fee <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Pullman’s representative.</p>
|
||||
<p>I went immediately to the Capitol.</p>
|
||||
<p>In a spirit of jeu d’esprit I had had made a globular representation of a “rolling stone.” It was of wood, painted a dark color, and about the size of a small cannon ball. I had attached to it a twisted pendant about three inches long to indicate moss. I had resolved to use this in place of a card, thinking people would readily recognize it as an emblem of my paper.</p>
|
||||
<p>I had studied the arrangement of the Capitol, and walked directly to Mr. Cleveland’s private office.</p>
|
||||
<p>I had studied the arrangement of the Capitol, and walked directly to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cleveland’s private office.</p>
|
||||
<p>I met a servant in the hall, and held up my card to him smilingly.</p>
|
||||
<p>I saw his hair rise on his head, and he ran like a deer to the door, and, lying down, rolled down the long flight of steps into the yard.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Ah,” said I to myself, “he is one of our delinquent subscribers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A little farther along I met the President’s private secretary, who had been writing a tariff letter and cleaning a duck gun for Mr. Cleveland.</p>
|
||||
<p>A little farther along I met the President’s private secretary, who had been writing a tariff letter and cleaning a duck gun for <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cleveland.</p>
|
||||
<p>When I showed him the emblem of my paper he sprang out of a high window into a hothouse filled with rare flowers.</p>
|
||||
<p>This somewhat surprised me.</p>
|
||||
<p>I examined myself. My hat was on straight, and there was nothing at all alarming about my appearance.</p>
|
||||
<p>I went into the President’s private office.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was alone. He was conversing with Tom Ochiltree. Mr. Ochiltree saw my little sphere, and with a loud scream rushed out of the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>He was alone. He was conversing with Tom Ochiltree. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ochiltree saw my little sphere, and with a loud scream rushed out of the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>President Cleveland slowly turned his eyes upon me.</p>
|
||||
<p>He also saw what I had in my hand, and said in a husky voice:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Wait a moment, please.”</p>
|
||||
@ -49,7 +49,7 @@
|
||||
<p>He laid this on his desk and rose to his feet, raised one hand above him, and said in deep tones:</p>
|
||||
<p>“I die for Free Trade, my country, and—and—all that sort of thing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I saw him jerk a string, and a camera snapped on another table, taking our picture as we stood.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t die in the House, Mr. President,” I said. “Go over into the Senate Chamber.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Don’t die in the House, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> President,” I said. “Go over into the Senate Chamber.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Peace, murderer!” he said. “Let your bomb do its deadly work.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I’m no bum,” I said, with spirit. “I represent <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, of Austin, Texas, and this I hold in my hand does the same thing, but, it seems, unsuccessfully.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The President sank back in his chair greatly relieved.</p>
|
||||
@ -60,17 +60,17 @@
|
||||
<p>“Who is President of Texas now?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t exactly—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, excuse me. I forgot again. I thought I heard some talk of its having been made a Republic again.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, Mr. Cleveland,” I said, “you answer some of my questions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Now, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cleveland,” I said, “you answer some of my questions.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A curious film came over the President’s eyes. He sat stiffly in his chair like an automaton.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Proceed,” he said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What do you think of the political future of this country?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I will state that political exigencies demand emergentistical promptitude, and while the United States is indissoluble in conception and invisible in intent, treason and internecine disagreement have ruptured the consanguinity of patriotism, and—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One moment, Mr. President,” I interrupted; “would you mind changing that cylinder? I could have gotten all that from the American Press Association if I had wanted plate matter. Do you wear flannels? What is your favorite poet, brand of catsup, bird, flower, and what are you going to do when you are out of a job?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Young man,” said Mr. Cleveland, sternly, “you are going a little too far. My private affairs do not concern the public.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“One moment, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> President,” I interrupted; “would you mind changing that cylinder? I could have gotten all that from the American Press Association if I had wanted plate matter. Do you wear flannels? What is your favorite poet, brand of catsup, bird, flower, and what are you going to do when you are out of a job?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Young man,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cleveland, sternly, “you are going a little too far. My private affairs do not concern the public.”</p>
|
||||
<p>I begged his pardon, and he recovered his good humor in a moment.</p>
|
||||
<p>“You Texans have a great representative in Senator Mills,” he said. “I think the greatest two speeches I ever heard were his address before the Senate advocating the removal of the tariff on salt and increasing it on chloride of sodium.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tom Ochiltree is also from our State,” I said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, no, he isn’t. You must be mistaken,” replied Mr. Cleveland, “for he says he is. I really must go down to Texas some time, and see the State. I want to go up into the Panhandle and see if it is really shaped like it is on the map.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Oh, no, he isn’t. You must be mistaken,” replied <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cleveland, “for he says he is. I really must go down to Texas some time, and see the State. I want to go up into the Panhandle and see if it is really shaped like it is on the map.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, I must be going,” said I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When you get back to Texas,” said the President, rising, “you must write to me. Your visit has awakened in me quite an interest in your State which I fear I have not given the attention it deserves. There are many historical and otherwise interesting places that you have revived in my recollection—the Alamo, where Davy Jones fell; Goliad, Sam Houston’s surrender to Montezuma, the petrified boom found near Austin, five-cent cotton and the Siamese Democratic platform born in Dallas. I should so much like to see the gals in Galveston, and go to the wake in Waco. I am glad I met you. Turn to the left as you enter the hall and keep straight on out.” I made a low bow to signify that the interview was at an end, and withdrew immediately. I had no difficulty in leaving the building as soon as I was outside.</p>
|
||||
<p>I hurried downtown in order to obtain refreshments at some place where viands had been placed upon the free list.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-15" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>AN UNFINISHED CHRISTMAS STORY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Probably begun several years before his death. Published, as it here appears, in <i>Short Stories</i>, January, 1911.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-15" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">AN UNFINISHED CHRISTMAS STORY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Probably begun several years before his death. Published, as it here appears, in <i>Short Stories</i>, January, 1911.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>Now, a Christmas story should be one. For a good many years the ingenious writers have been putting forth tales for the holiday numbers that employed every subtle, evasive, indirect and strategic scheme they could invent to disguise the Christmas flavor. So far has this new practice been carried that nowadays when you read a story in a holiday magazine the only way you can tell it is a Christmas story is to look at the footnote which reads: [“The incidents in the above story happened on December 25th.—<span class="smallcaps">Ed</span>.”]</p>
|
||||
<p>There is progress in this; but it is all very sad. There are just as many real Christmas stories as ever, if we would only dig ’em up. Me, I am for the Scrooge and Marley Christmas story, and the Annie and Willie’s prayer poem, and the long lost son coming home on the stroke of twelve to the poorly thatched cottage with his arms full of talking dolls and popcorn balls and—Zip! you hear the second mortgage on the cottage go flying off it into the deep snow.</p>
|
||||
<p>So, this is to warn you that there is no subterfuge about this story—and you might come upon stockings hung to the mantel and plum puddings and hark! the chimes! and wealthy misers loosening up and handing over penny whistles to lame newsboys if you read further.</p>
|
||||
@ -22,24 +22,24 @@
|
||||
<p>The rest of her was yellow. Her hair, in some bygone age, had been dipped in the fountain of folly presided over by the merry nymph Hydrogen; but now, except at the roots, it had returned to its natural grim and grizzled white.</p>
|
||||
<p>Her eyes and teeth and finger nails were yellow. Her chops hung low and shook when she moved. The look on her face was exactly that smileless look of fatal melancholy that you may have seen on the countenance of a hound left sitting on the doorstep of a deserted cabin.</p>
|
||||
<p>I inquired for Paley. After a long look of cold suspicion the landlady spoke, and her voice matched the dingy roughness of her flannel sacque.</p>
|
||||
<p>Paley? Was I sure that was the name? And wasn’t it, likely, Mr. Sanderson I meant, in the third floor rear? No; it was Paley I wanted. Again that frozen, shrewd, steady study of my soul from her pale-yellow, unwinking eyes, trying to penetrate my mask of deception and rout out my true motives from my lying lips. There was a Mr. Tompkins in the front hall bedroom two flights up. Perhaps it was he I was seeking. He worked of nights; he never came in till seven in the morning. Or if it was really Mr. Tucker (thinly disguised as Paley) that I was hunting I would have to call between five and—</p>
|
||||
<p>Paley? Was I sure that was the name? And wasn’t it, likely, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sanderson I meant, in the third floor rear? No; it was Paley I wanted. Again that frozen, shrewd, steady study of my soul from her pale-yellow, unwinking eyes, trying to penetrate my mask of deception and rout out my true motives from my lying lips. There was a <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tompkins in the front hall bedroom two flights up. Perhaps it was he I was seeking. He worked of nights; he never came in till seven in the morning. Or if it was really <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker (thinly disguised as Paley) that I was hunting I would have to call between five and—</p>
|
||||
<p>But no; I held firmly to Paley. There was no such name among her lodgers. Click! the door closed swiftly in my face; and I heard through the panels the clanking of chains and bolts.</p>
|
||||
<p>I went down the steps and stopped to consider. The number of this house was 43. I was sure Paley had said 43—or perhaps it was 45 or 47—I decided to try 47, the second house farther along.</p>
|
||||
<p>I rang the bell. The door opened; and there stood the same woman. I wasn’t confronted by just a resemblance—it was the <i>same</i> woman holding together the same old sacque at her throat and looking at me with the same yellow eyes as if she had never seen me before on earth. I saw on the knuckle of her second finger the same red-and-black spot made, probably, by a recent burn against a hot stove.</p>
|
||||
<p>I stood speechless and gaping while one with moderate haste might have told fifty. I couldn’t have spoken Paley’s name even if I had remembered it. I did the only thing that a brave man who believes there are mysterious forces in nature that we do not yet fully comprehend could have done in the circumstances. I backed down the steps to the sidewalk and then hurried away frontward, fully understanding how incidents like that must bother the psychical research people and the census takers.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of course I heard an explanation of it afterward, as we always do about inexplicable things.</p>
|
||||
<p>The landlady was Mrs. Kannon; and she leased three adjoining houses, which she made into one by cutting arched doorways through the walls. She sat in the middle house and answered the three bells.</p>
|
||||
<p>I wonder why I have maundered so slowly through the prologue. I have it! it was simply to say to you, in the form of introduction rife through the Middle West: “Shake hands with Mrs. Kannon.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The landlady was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kannon; and she leased three adjoining houses, which she made into one by cutting arched doorways through the walls. She sat in the middle house and answered the three bells.</p>
|
||||
<p>I wonder why I have maundered so slowly through the prologue. I have it! it was simply to say to you, in the form of introduction rife through the Middle West: “Shake hands with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kannon.”</p>
|
||||
<p>For, it was in her triple house that the Christmas story happened; and it was there where I picked up the incontrovertible facts from the gossip of many roomers and met Stickney—and saw the necktie.</p>
|
||||
<p>Christmas came that year on Thursday, and snow came with it.</p>
|
||||
<p>Stickney (Harry Clarence Fowler Stickney to whomsoever his full baptismal cognominal burdens may be of interest) reached his address at six-thirty Wednesday afternoon. “Address” is New Yorkese for “home.” Stickney roomed at 45 West ‘Teenth Street, third floor rear hall room. He was twenty years and four months old, and he worked in a cameras-of-all-kinds, photographic supplies and films-developed store. I don’t know what kind of work he did in the store; but you must have seen him. He is the young man who always comes behind the counter to wait on you and lets you talk for five minutes, telling him what you want. When you are done, he calls the proprietor at the top of his voice to wait on you, and walks away whistling between his teeth.</p>
|
||||
<p>I don’t want to bother about describing to you his appearance; but, if you are a man reader, I will say that Stickncy looked precisely like the young chap that you always find sitting in your chair smoking a cigarette after you have missed a shot while playing pool—not billiards but pool—when you want to sit down yourself.</p>
|
||||
<p>There are some to whom Christmas gives no Christmassy essence. Of course, prosperous people and comfortable people who have homes or flats or rooms with meals, and even people who live in apartment houses with hotel service get something of the Christmas flavor. They give one another presents with the cost mark scratched off with a penknife; and they hang holly wreaths in the front windows and when they are asked whether they prefer light or dark meat from the turkey they say: “Both, please,” and giggle and have lots of fun. And the very poorest people have the best time of it. The Army gives ’em a dinner, and the 10 <span class="smallcaps">a. m.</span> issue of the Night Final edition of the newspaper with the largest circulation in the city leaves a basket at their door full of an apple, a Lake Ronkonkoma squab, a scrambled eggplant and a bunch of Kalamazoo bleached parsley. The poorer you are the more Christmas does for you.</p>
|
||||
<p>There are some to whom Christmas gives no Christmassy essence. Of course, prosperous people and comfortable people who have homes or flats or rooms with meals, and even people who live in apartment houses with hotel service get something of the Christmas flavor. They give one another presents with the cost mark scratched off with a penknife; and they hang holly wreaths in the front windows and when they are asked whether they prefer light or dark meat from the turkey they say: “Both, please,” and giggle and have lots of fun. And the very poorest people have the best time of it. The Army gives ’em a dinner, and the 10 <span class="smallcaps"><abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr></span> issue of the Night Final edition of the newspaper with the largest circulation in the city leaves a basket at their door full of an apple, a Lake Ronkonkoma squab, a scrambled eggplant and a bunch of Kalamazoo bleached parsley. The poorer you are the more Christmas does for you.</p>
|
||||
<p>But, I’ll tell you to what kind of a mortal Christmas seems to be only the day before the twenty-sixth day of December. It’s the chap in the big city earning sixteen dollars a week, with no friends and few acquaintances, who finds himself with only fifty cents in his pocket on Christmas eve. He can’t accept charity; he can’t borrow; he knows no one who would invite him to dinner. I have a fancy that when the shepherds left their flocks to follow the star of Bethlehem there was a bandy-legged young fellow among them who was just learning the sheep business. So they said to him, “Bobby, we’re going to investigate this star route and see what’s in it. If it should turn out to be the first Christmas day we don’t want to miss it. And, as you are not a wise man, and as you couldn’t possibly purchase a present to take along, suppose you stay behind and mind the sheep.”</p>
|
||||
<p>So as we may say, Harry Stickney was a direct descendant of the shepherd who was left behind to take care of the flocks.</p>
|
||||
<p>Getting back to facts, Stickney rang the doorbell of 45. He had a habit of forgetting his latchkey.</p>
|
||||
<p>Instantly the door opened and there stood Mrs. Kannon, clutching her sacque together at the throat and gorgonizing him with her opaque, yellow eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>(To give you good measure, here is a story within a story. Once a roomer in 47 who had the Scotch habit—not kilts, but a habit of drinking Scotch—began to figure to himself what might happen if two persons should ring the doorbells of 43 and 47 at the same time. Visions of two halves of Mrs. Kannon appearing respectively and simultaneously at the two entrances, each clutching at a side of an open, flapping sacque that could never meet, overpowered him. Bellevue got him.)</p>
|
||||
<p>Instantly the door opened and there stood <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kannon, clutching her sacque together at the throat and gorgonizing him with her opaque, yellow eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>(To give you good measure, here is a story within a story. Once a roomer in 47 who had the Scotch habit—not kilts, but a habit of drinking Scotch—began to figure to himself what might happen if two persons should ring the doorbells of 43 and 47 at the same time. Visions of two halves of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Kannon appearing respectively and simultaneously at the two entrances, each clutching at a side of an open, flapping sacque that could never meet, overpowered him. Bellevue got him.)</p>
|
||||
<p>“Evening,” said Stickney cheerlessly, as he distributed little piles of muddy slush along the hall matting. “Think we’ll have snow?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You left your key,” said—</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,29 +6,29 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-16" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE UNPROFITABLE SERVANT</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Left unfinished, and published as it here appears in <i>Everybody’s Magazine</i>, December, 1911.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-16" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE UNPROFITABLE SERVANT</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Left unfinished, and published as it here appears in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Everybody’s Magazine</i>, December, 1911.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>I am the richer by the acquaintance of four newspaper men. Singly, they are my encyclopedias, friends, mentors, and sometimes bankers. But now and then it happens that all of them will pitch upon the same printworthy incident of the passing earthly panorama and will send in reportorial constructions thereof to their respective journals. It is then that, for me, it is to laugh. For it seems that to each of them, trained and skilled as he may be, the same occurrence presents a different facet of the cut diamond, life.</p>
|
||||
<p>One will have it (let us say) that Mme. André Macarté’s apartment was looted by six burglars, who descended via the fire-escape and bore away a ruby tiara valued at two thousand dollars and a five-hundred-dollar prize Spitz dog, which (in violation of the expectoration ordinance) was making free with the halls of the Wuttapesituckquesunoowetunquah Apartments.</p>
|
||||
<p>My second “chiel” will take notes to the effect that while a friendly game of pinochle was in progress in the tenement rooms of Mrs. Andy McCarty, a lady guest named Ruby O’Hara threw a burglar down six flights of stairs, where he was pinioned and held by a two-thousand-dollar English bulldog amid a crowd of five hundred excited spectators.</p>
|
||||
<p>My third chronicler and friend will gather the news threads of the happening in his own happy way; setting forth on the page for you to read that the house of Antonio Macartini was blown up at 6 <span class="smallcaps">a. m.</span>, by the Black Hand Society, on his refusing to leave two thousand dollars at a certain street corner, killing a pet five-hundred-dollar Pomeranian belonging to Alderman Rubitara’s little daughter (see photo and diagram opposite).</p>
|
||||
<p>Number four of my history-makers will simply construe from the premises the story that while an audience of two thousand enthusiasts was listening to a Rubinstein concert on Sixth Street, a woman who said she was Mrs. Andrew M. Carter threw a brick through a plate-glass window valued at five hundred dollars. The Carter woman claimed that some one in the building had stolen her dog.</p>
|
||||
<p>One will have it (let us say) that <abbr>Mme.</abbr> André Macarté’s apartment was looted by six burglars, who descended via the fire-escape and bore away a ruby tiara valued at two thousand dollars and a five-hundred-dollar prize Spitz dog, which (in violation of the expectoration ordinance) was making free with the halls of the Wuttapesituckquesunoowetunquah Apartments.</p>
|
||||
<p>My second “chiel” will take notes to the effect that while a friendly game of pinochle was in progress in the tenement rooms of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Andy McCarty, a lady guest named Ruby O’Hara threw a burglar down six flights of stairs, where he was pinioned and held by a two-thousand-dollar English bulldog amid a crowd of five hundred excited spectators.</p>
|
||||
<p>My third chronicler and friend will gather the news threads of the happening in his own happy way; setting forth on the page for you to read that the house of Antonio Macartini was blown up at 6 <span class="smallcaps"><abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr></span>, by the Black Hand Society, on his refusing to leave two thousand dollars at a certain street corner, killing a pet five-hundred-dollar Pomeranian belonging to Alderman Rubitara’s little daughter (see photo and diagram opposite).</p>
|
||||
<p>Number four of my history-makers will simply construe from the premises the story that while an audience of two thousand enthusiasts was listening to a Rubinstein concert on Sixth Street, a woman who said she was <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Andrew M. Carter threw a brick through a plate-glass window valued at five hundred dollars. The Carter woman claimed that some one in the building had stolen her dog.</p>
|
||||
<p>Now, the discrepancies in these registrations of the day’s doings need do no one hurt. Surely, one newspaper is enough for any man to prop against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his wife’s glance. If he be foolish enough to read four he is no wiser than a Higher Critic.</p>
|
||||
<p>I remember (probably as well as you do) having read the parable of the talents. A prominent citizen, about to journey into a far country, first hands over to his servants his goods. To one he gives five talents; to another two; to another one—to every man according to his several ability, as the text has it. There are two versions of this parable, as you well know. There may be more—I do not know.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the p. c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put their talents out at usury and gained one hundred per cent. Good. The unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks, surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned was composed of 750 ounces of silver—about $900 worth. So the chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used in those davs. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word “pound” instead of “talent.”</p>
|
||||
<p>When the <abbr>p.</abbr> c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put their talents out at usury and gained one hundred per cent. Good. The unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks, surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned was composed of 750 ounces of silver—about $900 worth. So the chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used in those davs. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word “pound” instead of “talent.”</p>
|
||||
<p>A pound of silver may very well be laid away—and carried away—in a napkin, as any hotel or restaurant man will tell you.</p>
|
||||
<p>But let us get away from our mutton.</p>
|
||||
<p>When the returned nobleman finds that the one-talented servant has nothing to hand over except the original fund entrusted to him, he is as angry as a multi-millionaire would be if some one should hide under his bed and make a noise like an assessment. He orders the unprofitable servant cast into outer darkness, after first taking away his talent and giving it to the one-hundred-per cent. financier, and breathing strange saws, saying: “From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Which is the same as to say: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”</p>
|
||||
<p>And now closer draw the threads of parable, precept allegory, and narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors trip on.</p>
|
||||
<p>Talent: A gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the parable in Matt. XXV. 14–30.)</p>
|
||||
<p>Talent: A gift, endowment or faculty; some peculiar ability, power, or accomplishment, natural or acquired. (A metaphor borrowed from the parable in Matt. <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XXV</span>. 14–30.)</p>
|
||||
<p>In New York City to-day there are (estimated) 125,000 living creatures training for the stage. This does not include seals, pigs, dogs, elephants, prize-fighters, Carmens, mind-readers, or Japanese wrestlers. The bulk of them are in the ranks of the Four Million. Out of this number will survive a thousand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nine hundred of these will have attained their fulness of fame when they shall dubiously indicate with the point of a hatpin a blurred figure in a flashlight photograph of a stage tout ensemble with the proud commentary: “That’s me.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis XIV court costumes, shall welcome the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words, turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.</p>
|
||||
<p>Eighty, in the pinkest of (male) Louis <span epub:type="z3998:roman">XIV</span> court costumes, shall welcome the Queen of the (mythical) Pawpaw Isles in a few well-memorized words, turning a tip-tilted nose upon the nine hundred.</p>
|
||||
<p>Ten, in tiny lace caps, shall dust Ibsen furniture for six minutes after the rising of the curtain.</p>
|
||||
<p>Nine shall attain the circuits, besieging with muscle, skill, eye, hand, voice, wit, brain, heel and toe the ultimate high walls of stardom.</p>
|
||||
<p>One shall inherit Broadway. Sic venit gloria mundi.</p>
|
||||
@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Of all kinships it is likely that the closest is that of cousin. Between cousins there exist the ties of race, name, and favor—ties thicker than water, and yet not coagulated with the jealous precipitations of brotherhood or the enjoining obligations of the matrimonial yoke. You can bestow upon a cousin almost the interest and affection that you would give to a stranger; you need not feel toward him the contempt and embarrassment that you have for one of your father’s sons—it is the closer clan-feeling that sometimes makes the branch of a tree stronger than its trunk.</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus were the two McGowans bonded. They enjoyed a quiet celebrity in their district, which was a strip west of Eighth Avenue with the Pump for its pivot. Their talents were praised in a hundred “joints”; their friendship was famed even in a neighborhood where men had been known to fight off the wives of their friends—when domestic onslaught was being made upon their friends by the wives of their friends. (Thus do the limitations of English force us to repetends.)</p>
|
||||
<p>So, side by side, grim, sallow, lowering, inseparable, undefeated, the cousins fought their way into the temple of Art—art with a big A, which causes to intervene a lesson in geometry.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night at about eleven o’clock Del Delano dropped into Mike’s place on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the café became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or Mr. Shaw, of England, had accepted an invitation to read selections from “Rena, the Snow-bird” at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O’Connor at Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the place.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night at about eleven o’clock Del Delano dropped into Mike’s place on Eighth Avenue. From that moment, instead of remaining a Place, the café became a Resort. It was as though King Edward had condescended to mingle with ten-spots of a different suit; or Joe Gans had casually strolled in to look over the Tuskegee School; or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Shaw, of England, had accepted an invitation to read selections from “Rena, the Snow-bird” at an unveiling of the proposed monument to James Owen O’Connor at Chinquapin Falls, Mississippi. In spite of these comparisons, you will have to be told why the patronizing of a third-rate saloon on the West Side by the said Del Delano conferred such a specific honor upon the place.</p>
|
||||
<p>Del Delano could not make his feet behave; and so the world paid him $300 a week to see them misconduct themselves on the vaudeville stage. To make the matter plain to you (and to swell the number of words), he was the best fancy dancer on any of the circuits between Ottawa and Corpus Christi. With his eyes fixed on vacancy and his feet apparently fixed on nothing, he “nightly charmed thousands,” as his press-agent incorrectly stated. Even taking night performance and matinée together, he scarcely could have charmed more than eighteen hundred, including those who left after Zora, the Nautch girl, had squeezed herself through a hoop twelve inches in diameter, and those who were waiting for the moving pictures.</p>
|
||||
<p>But Del Delano was the West Side’s favorite; and nowhere is there a more loyal Side. Five years before our story was submitted to the editors, Del had crawled from some Tenth Avenue basement like a lean rat and had bitten his way into the Big Cheese. Patched, half-starved, cuffless, and as scornful of the Hook as an interpreter of Ibsen, he had danced his way into health (as you and I view it) and fame in sixteen minutes on Amateur Night at Creary’s (Variety) Theatre in Eighth Avenue. A bookmaker (one of the kind that talent wins with instead of losing) sat in the audience, asleep, dreaming of an impossible pick-up among the amateurs. After a snore, a glass of beer from the handsome waiter, and a temporary blindness caused by the diamonds of a transmontane blonde in Box E, the bookmaker woke up long enough to engage Del Delano for a three-weeks’ trial engagement fused with a trained-dog short-circuit covering the three Washingtons—Heights, Statue, and Square.</p>
|
||||
<p>By the time this story was read and accepted, Del Delano was drawing his three-hundred dollars a week, which, divided by seven (Sunday acts not in costume being permissible), dispels the delusion entertained by most of us that we have seen better days. You can easily imagine the worshipful agitation of Eighth Avenue whenever Del Delano honored it with a visit after his terpsichorean act in a historically great and vilely ventilated Broadway theatre. If the West Side could claim forty-two minutes out of his forty-two weeks’ bookings every year, it was an occasion for bonfires and repainting of the Pump. And now you know why Mike’s saloon is a Resort, and no longer a simple Place.</p>
|
||||
@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p class="noindent">… easily among the wings with his patron, the great Del Delano. For, whatever footlights shone in the City-That-Would-Be-Amused, the freedom of their unshaded side was Del’s. And if he should take up an amateur—see? and bring him around—see? and, winking one of his cold blue eyes, say to the manager: “Take it from me—he’s got the goods—see?” you wouldn’t expect that amateur to sit on an unpainted bench sudorifically awaiting his turn, would you? So Mac strolled around largely with the nonpareil; and the seven waited, clammily, on the bench.</p>
|
||||
<p>A giant in shirt-sleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches had been taken by surgeons from time to time, <i>i.e.</i>, with a long stick, looped at the end. He was the man with the Hook. The manager, with his close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of the amateurs. The last of the professional turns—the Grand March of the Happy Huzzard—had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage. The man in the orchestra who played the kettle-drum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper, whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had wiped his brow. The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.</p>
|
||||
<p>A giant in shirt-sleeves, with a grim, kind face in which many stitches had been taken by surgeons from time to time, <i><abbr>i.e.</abbr></i>, with a long stick, looped at the end. He was the man with the Hook. The manager, with his close-smoothed blond hair, his one-sided smile, and his abnormally easy manner, pored with patient condescension over the difficult program of the amateurs. The last of the professional turns—the Grand March of the Happy Huzzard—had been completed; the last wrinkle and darn of their blue silkolene cotton tights had vanished from the stage. The man in the orchestra who played the kettle-drum, cymbals, triangle, sandpaper, whang-doodle, hoof-beats, and catcalls, and fired the pistol shots, had wiped his brow. The illegal holiday of the Romans had arrived.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the orchestra plays the famous waltz from “The Dismal Wife,” let us bestow two hundred words upon the psychology of the audience.</p>
|
||||
<p>The orchestra floor was filled by People. The boxes contained Persons. In the galleries was the Foreordained Verdict. The claque was there as it had originated in the Stone Age and was afterward adapted by the French. Every Micky and Maggie who sat upon Creary’s amateur bench, wise beyond their talents, knew that their success or doom lay already meted out to them by that crowded, whistling, roaring mass of Romans in the three galleries. They knew that the winning or the losing of the game for each one lay in the strength of the “gang” aloft that could turn the applause to its favorite. On a Broadway first night a wooer of fame may win it from the ticket buyers over the heads of the cognoscenti. But not so at Creary’s. The amateur’s fate is arithmetical. The number of his supporting admirers present at his try-out decides it in advance. But how these outlying Friday nights put to a certain shame the Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and matinées of the Broadway stage you should know …</p>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-17" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>ARISTOCRACY VERSUS HASH</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[From <i>The Rolling Stone</i>.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-17" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">ARISTOCRACY VERSUS HASH</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>From <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>The snake reporter of <i>The Rolling Stone</i> was wandering up the avenue last night on his way home from the Y.M.C.A. rooms when he was approached by a gaunt, hungry-looking man with wild eyes and dishevelled hair. He accosted the reporter in a hollow, weak voice.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Can you tell me, Sir, where I can find in this town a family of scrubs?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I don’t understand exactly.’</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-18" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE PRISONER OF ZEMBLA</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[From <i>The Rolling Stone</i>.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-18" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE PRISONER OF ZEMBLA</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>From <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>So the king fell into a furious rage, so that none durst go near him for fear, and he gave out that since the Princess Ostla had disobeyed him there would be a great tourney, and to the knight who should prove himself of the greatest valor he would give the hand of the princess.</p>
|
||||
<p>And he sent forth a herald to proclaim that he would do this.</p>
|
||||
<p>And the herald went about the country making his desire known, blowing a great tin horn and riding a noble steed that pranced and gambolled; and the villagers gazed upon him and said: “Lo, that is one of them tin horn gamblers concerning which the chroniclers have told us.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-19" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>A STRANGE STORY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[From <i>The Rolling Stone</i>.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-19" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A STRANGE STORY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>From <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>In the northern part of Austin there once dwelt an honest family by the name of Smothers. The family consisted of John Smothers, his wife, himself, their little daughter, five years of age, and her parents, making six people toward the population of the city when counted for a special write-up, but only three by actual count.</p>
|
||||
<p>One night after supper the little girl was seized with a severe colic, and John Smothers hurried down town to get some medicine.</p>
|
||||
<p>He never came back.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE DREAM</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[This was the last work of O. Henry. The <i>Cosmopolitan Magazine</i> had ordered it from him and, after his death, the unfinished manuscript was found in his room, on his dusty desk. The story as it here appears was published in the <i>Cosmopolitan</i> for September, 1910.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-2" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE DREAM</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>This was the last work of O. Henry. The <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Cosmopolitan Magazine</i> had ordered it from him and, after his death, the unfinished manuscript was found in his room, on his dusty desk. The story as it here appears was published in the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Cosmopolitan</i> for September, 1910.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>Murray dreamed a dream.</p>
|
||||
<p>Both psychology and science grope when they would explain to us the strange adventures of our immaterial selves when wandering in the realm of “Death’s twin brother, Sleep.” This story will not attempt to be illuminative; it is no more than a record of Murray’s dream. One of the most puzzling phases of that strange waking sleep is that dreams which seem to cover months or even years may take place within a few seconds or minutes.</p>
|
||||
<p>Murray was waiting in his cell in the ward of the condemned. An electric arc light in the ceiling of the corridor shone brightly upon his table. On a sheet of white paper an ant crawled wildly here and there as Murray blocked its way with an envelope. The electrocution was set for eight o’clock in the evening. Murray smiled at the antics of the wisest of insects.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,14 +6,14 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-20" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>FICKLE FORTUNE OR HOW GLADYS HUSTLED</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[From <i>The Rolling Stone</i>.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-20" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">FICKLE FORTUNE OR HOW GLADYS HUSTLED</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>From <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>“Press me no more Mr. Snooper,” said Gladys Vavasour-Smith. “I can never be yours.”</p>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>“Press me no more <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Snooper,” said Gladys Vavasour-Smith. “I can never be yours.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“You have led me to believe different, Gladys,” said Bertram D. Snooper.</p>
|
||||
<p>The setting sun was flooding with golden light the oriel windows of a magnificent mansion situated in one of the most aristocratic streets west of the brick yard.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bertram D. Snooper, a poor but ambitious and talented young lawyer, had just lost his first suit. He had dared to aspire to the hand of Gladys Vavasour-Smith, the beautiful and talented daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families in the county. The bluest blood flowed in her veins. Her grandfather had sawed wood for the Hornsbys and an aunt on her mother’s side had married a man who had been kicked by General Lee’s mule.</p>
|
||||
@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
|
||||
<p>She then left the room.</p>
|
||||
<p>When she did so, a dark-complexioned man with black hair and gloomy, desperate looking clothes, came out of the fireplace where he had been concealed and stated:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Aha! I have you in my power at last, Bertram D. Snooper. Gladys Vavasour-Smith shall be mine. I am in the possession of secrets that not a soul in the world suspects. I have papers to prove that Bertram Snooper is the heir to the Tom Bean estate, <a name="footnotetag12"/><a href="#footnote12">[12]</a> and I have discovered that Gladys’ grandfather who sawed wood for the Hornsby’s was also a cook in Major Rhoads Fisher’s command during the war. Therefore, the family repudiate her, and she will marry me in order to drag their proud name down in the dust. Ha, ha, ha!”</p>
|
||||
<p>As the reader has doubtless long ago discovered, this man was no other than Henry R. Grasty. Mr. Grasty then proceeded to gloat some more, and then with a sardonic laugh left for New York.</p>
|
||||
<p>As the reader has doubtless long ago discovered, this man was no other than Henry R. Grasty. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Grasty then proceeded to gloat some more, and then with a sardonic laugh left for New York.</p>
|
||||
<hr class="tiny"/>
|
||||
<p>Fifteen years have elapsed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Of course, our readers will understand that this is only supposed to the the case.</p>
|
||||
@ -38,20 +38,20 @@
|
||||
<p>We could not afford to stop a piece in the middle and wait fifteen years before continuing it.</p>
|
||||
<p>We hope this explanation will suffice. We are careful not to create any wrong impressions.</p>
|
||||
<p>Gladys Vavasour-Smith and Henry R. Grasty stood at the marriage altar.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Grasty had evidently worked his rabbit’s foot successfully, although he was quite a while in doing so.</p>
|
||||
<p>Just as the preacher was about to pronounce the fatal words on which he would have realized ten dollars and had the laugh on Mr. Grasty, the steeple of the church fell off and Bertram D. Snooper entered.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Grasty had evidently worked his rabbit’s foot successfully, although he was quite a while in doing so.</p>
|
||||
<p>Just as the preacher was about to pronounce the fatal words on which he would have realized ten dollars and had the laugh on <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Grasty, the steeple of the church fell off and Bertram D. Snooper entered.</p>
|
||||
<p>The preacher fell to the ground with a dull thud. He could ill afford to lose ten dollars. He was hastily removed and a cheaper one secured.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bertram D. Snooper held a <i>Statesman</i> in his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Aha!” he said, “I thought I would surprise you. I just got in this morning. Here is a paper noticing my arrival.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He handed it to Henry R. Grasty.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Grasty looked at the paper and turned deadly pale. It was dated three weeks after Mr. Snooper’s arrival.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Grasty looked at the paper and turned deadly pale. It was dated three weeks after <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Snooper’s arrival.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Foiled again!” he hissed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Speak, Bertram D. Snooper,” said Gladys, “why have you come between me and Henry?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I have just discovered that I am the sole heir to Tom Bean’s estate and am worth two million dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>With a glad cry Gladys threw herself in Bertram’s arms.</p>
|
||||
<p>Henry R. Grasty drew from his breast pocket a large tin box and opened it, took therefrom 467 pages of closely written foolscap.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What you say is true, Mr. Snooper, but I ask you to read that,” he said, handing it to Bertram Snooper.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Snooper had no sooner read the document than he uttered a piercing shriek and bit off a large chew of tobacco.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What you say is true, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Snooper, but I ask you to read that,” he said, handing it to Bertram Snooper.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Snooper had no sooner read the document than he uttered a piercing shriek and bit off a large chew of tobacco.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All is lost,” he said.</p>
|
||||
<p>“What is that document?” asked Gladys. “Governor Hogg’s message?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is not as bad as that,” said Bertram, “but it deprives me of my entire fortune. But I care not for that, Gladys, since I have won you.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-21" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>AN APOLOGY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[This appeared in <i>The Rolling Stone</i> shortly before it “suspended publication” never to resume.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-21" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">AN APOLOGY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>This appeared in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i> shortly before it “suspended publication” never to resume.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>The person who sweeps the office, translates letters from foreign countries, deciphers communications from graduates of business colleges, and does most of the writing for this paper, has been confined for the past two weeks to the under side of a large red quilt, with a joint caucus of la grippe and measles.</p>
|
||||
<p>We have missed two issues of <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, and are now slightly convalescent, for which we desire to apologize and express our regrets.</p>
|
||||
<p>Everybody’s term of subscription will be extended enough to cover all missed issues, and we hope soon to report that the goose remains suspended at a favorable altitude. People who have tried to run a funny paper and entertain a congregation of large piebald measles at the same time will understand something of the tact, finesse, and hot sassafras tea required to do so. We expect to get out the paper regularly from this time on, but are forced to be very careful, as improper treatment and deleterious after-effects of measles, combined with the high price of paper and presswork, have been known to cause a relapse. Any one not getting their paper regularly will please come down and see about it, bringing with them a ham or any little delicacy relished by invalids.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,27 +6,35 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-22" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>LORD OAKHURST’S CURSE</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[This story was sent to Dr. Beall of Greensboro, N. C., in a letter in 1883, and so is one of O. Henry’s earliest attempts at writing.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-22" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">LORD OAKHURST’S CURSE</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>This story was sent to <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Beall of Greensboro, N. C., in a letter in 1883, and so is one of O. Henry’s earliest attempts at writing.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<h3>I</h3>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-1" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<p>Lord Oakhurst was thinking of days gone by, when he wooed and won his beautiful young wife, who was then but a charming and innocent girl. How clearly and minutely those scenes rose up at the call of his memory. He seemed to be standing once more beneath the old chestnut grove where they had plighted their troth in the twilight under the stars; while the rare fragrance of the June roses and the smell of supper came gently by on the breeze. There he had told her his love; how that his whole happiness and future joy lay in the hope that he might win her for a bride; that if she would trust her future to his care the devotedness of his lifetime should be hers, and his only thought would be to make her life one long day of sunshine and peanut candy.</p>
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<h3>II</h3>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-2" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<p>Sir Everhard approached the bedside of his patient and laid his hand gently on this sick man’s diagnosis. A shade of feeling passed over his professional countenance as he gravely and solemnly pronounced these words: “Madam, your husband has croaked.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Lady Oakhurst at first did not comprehend his technical language, and her lovely mouth let up for a moment on the cream almonds. But soon his meaning flashed upon her, and she seized an axe that her husband was accustomed to keep by his bedside to mangle his servants with, and struck open Lord Oakhurst’s cabinet containing his private papers, and with eager hands opened the document which she took therefrom. Then, with a wild, unearthly shriek that would have made a steam piano go out behind a barn and kick itself in despair, she fell senseless to the floor.</p>
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<h3>III—THE CURSE</h3>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
<section id="lord-oakhursts-curse-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h3 epub:type="title">
|
||||
<span epub:type="z3998:roman">III</span>
|
||||
<span epub:type="subtitle">The Curse</span>
|
||||
</h3>
|
||||
<p>Sir Everhard FitzArmond descended the stairway of Oakhurst Castle and passed out into the avenue that led from the doorway to the great iron gates of the park. Lord Oakhurst had been a great sportsman during his life and always kept a well-stocked kennel of curs, which now rushed out from their hiding places and with loud yelps sprang upon the physician, burying their fangs in his lower limbs and seriously damaging his apparel.</p>
|
||||
<p>Sir Everllard, startled out of his professional dignity and usual indifference to human suffering, by the personal application of feeling, gave vent to a most horrible and blighting CURSE and ran with great swiftness to his carriage and drove off toward the city.</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-23" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>BEXAR SCRIP NO. 2692</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[From <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, Saturday, March 5, 1894.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-23" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">BEXAR SCRIP NO. 2692</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>From <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>, Saturday, March 5, 1894.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>Whenever you visit Austin you should by all means go to see the General Land Office.</p>
|
||||
<p>As you pass up the avenue you turn sharp round the corner of the court house, and on a steep hill before you you see a mediæval castle.</p>
|
||||
<p>You think of the Rhine; the “castled crag of Drachenfels”; the Lorelei; and the vine-clad slopes of Germany. And German it is in every line of its architecture and design.</p>
|
||||
@ -43,13 +43,13 @@
|
||||
<p>In these days most of the mischief was done. In the file room, there are about–––– files, each in a paper wrapper, and comprising the title papers of a particular tract of land.</p>
|
||||
<p>You ask the clerk in charge for the papers relating to any survey in Texas. They are arranged simply in districts and numbers.</p>
|
||||
<p>He disappears from the door, you hear the sliding of a tin box, the lid snaps, and the file is in your hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>Go up there some day and call for Bexar Scrip No. 2692.</p>
|
||||
<p>Go up there some day and call for Bexar Scrip <abbr>No.</abbr> 2692.</p>
|
||||
<p>The file clerk stares at you for a second, says shortly:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Out of file.”</p>
|
||||
<p>It has been missing twenty years.</p>
|
||||
<p>The history of that file has never been written before.</p>
|
||||
<p>Twenty years ago there was a shrewd land agent living in Austin who devoted his undoubted talents and vast knowledge of land titles, and the laws governing them, to the locating of surveys made by illegal certificates, or improperly made, and otherwise of no value through non-compliance with the statutes, or whatever flaws his ingenious and unscrupulous mind could unearth.</p>
|
||||
<p>He found a fatal defect in the title of the land as on file in Bexar Scrip No. 2692 and placed a new certificate upon the survey in his own name.</p>
|
||||
<p>He found a fatal defect in the title of the land as on file in Bexar Scrip <abbr>No.</abbr> 2692 and placed a new certificate upon the survey in his own name.</p>
|
||||
<p>The law was on his side.</p>
|
||||
<p>Every sentiment of justice, of right, and humanity was against him.</p>
|
||||
<p>The certificate by virtue of which the original survey had been made was missing.</p>
|
||||
@ -68,13 +68,13 @@
|
||||
<p>The boy came up and leaned on the desk beside him.</p>
|
||||
<p>“A right interesting office, sir!” he said. “I have never been in here before. All those papers, now, they are about lands, are they not? The titles and deeds, and such things?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said Sharp. “They are supposed to contain all the title papers.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“This one, now,” said the boy, taking up Bexar Scrip No. 2692, “what land does this represent the title of? Ah, I see ‘Six hundred and forty acres in B–––– country? Absalom Harris, original grantee.’ Please tell me, I am so ignorant of these things, how can you tell a good survey from a bad one. I am told that there are a great many illegal and fraudulent surveys in this office. I suppose this one is all right?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“This one, now,” said the boy, taking up Bexar Scrip <abbr>No.</abbr> 2692, “what land does this represent the title of? Ah, I see ‘Six hundred and forty acres in B–––– country? Absalom Harris, original grantee.’ Please tell me, I am so ignorant of these things, how can you tell a good survey from a bad one. I am told that there are a great many illegal and fraudulent surveys in this office. I suppose this one is all right?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“No,” said Sharp. “The certificate is missing. It is invalid.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“That paper I just saw you place in that file, I suppose is something else—field notes, or a transfer probably?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes,” said Sharp, hurriedly, “corrected field notes. Excuse me, I am a little pressed for time.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The boy was watching him with bright, alert eyes.</p>
|
||||
<p>It would never do to leave the certificate in the file; but he could not take it out with that inquisitive boy watching him.</p>
|
||||
<p>He turned to the file room, with a dozen or more files in his hands, and accidentally dropped part of them on the floor. As he stooped to pick them up he swiftly thrust Bexar Scrip No. 2692 in the inside breast pocket of his coat.</p>
|
||||
<p>He turned to the file room, with a dozen or more files in his hands, and accidentally dropped part of them on the floor. As he stooped to pick them up he swiftly thrust Bexar Scrip <abbr>No.</abbr> 2692 in the inside breast pocket of his coat.</p>
|
||||
<p>This happened at just half-past four o’clock, and when the file clerk took the files he threw them in a pile in his room, came out and locked the door.</p>
|
||||
<p>The clerks were moving out of the doors in long, straggling lines.</p>
|
||||
<p>It was closing time.</p>
|
||||
@ -105,12 +105,12 @@
|
||||
<p>He leaned his head on his hands for a moment, and as he did so a sound behind him caused his heart to leap with guilty fear, but before he could rise, a hand came over his shoulder and grasped the file.</p>
|
||||
<p>He rose quickly, as white as paper, rattling his chair loudly on the stone floor.</p>
|
||||
<p>The boy who land spoken to him earlier stood contemplating him with contemptuous and flashing eyes, and quietly placed the file in the left breast pocket of his coat.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So, Mr. Sharp, by nature as well as by name,” he said, “it seems that I was right in waiting behind the door in order to see you safely out. You will appreciate the pleasure I feel in having done so when I tell you my name is Harris. My mother owns the land on which you have filed, and if there is any justice in Texas she shall hold it. I am not certain, but I think I saw you place a paper in this file this afternoon, and it is barely possible that it may be of value to me. I was also impressed with the idea that you desired to remove it again, but had not the opportunity. Anyway, I shall keep it until to-morrow and let the Commissioner decide.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Far back among Mr. Sharp’s ancestors there must have been some of the old berserker blood, for his caution, his presence of mind left him, and left him possessed of a blind, devilish, unreasoning rage that showed itself in a moment in the white glitter of his eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp, by nature as well as by name,” he said, “it seems that I was right in waiting behind the door in order to see you safely out. You will appreciate the pleasure I feel in having done so when I tell you my name is Harris. My mother owns the land on which you have filed, and if there is any justice in Texas she shall hold it. I am not certain, but I think I saw you place a paper in this file this afternoon, and it is barely possible that it may be of value to me. I was also impressed with the idea that you desired to remove it again, but had not the opportunity. Anyway, I shall keep it until to-morrow and let the Commissioner decide.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Far back among <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp’s ancestors there must have been some of the old berserker blood, for his caution, his presence of mind left him, and left him possessed of a blind, devilish, unreasoning rage that showed itself in a moment in the white glitter of his eye.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Give me that file, boy,” he said, thickly, holding out his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am no such fool, Mr. Sharp,” said the youth. “This file shall be laid before the Commissioner to-morrow for examination. If he finds—Help! Help!”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am no such fool, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp,” said the youth. “This file shall be laid before the Commissioner to-morrow for examination. If he finds—Help! Help!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Sharp was upon him like a tiger and bore him to the floor. The boy was strong and vigorous, but the suddenness of the attack gave him no chance to resist. He struggled up again to his feet, but it was an animal, with blazing eyes and cruel-looking teeth that fought him, instead of a man.</p>
|
||||
<p>Mr. Sharp, a man of high standing and good report, was battling for his reputation.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mr.</abbr> Sharp, a man of high standing and good report, was battling for his reputation.</p>
|
||||
<p>Presently there was a dull sound, and another, and still one more, and a blade flashing white and then red, and Edward Harris dropped down like some stuffed effigy of a man, that boys make for sport, with his limbs all crumpled and lax, on the stone floor of the Land Office.</p>
|
||||
<p>The old watchman was deaf, and heard nothing.</p>
|
||||
<p>The little dog barked at the foot of the stairs until his master made him come into his room.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-24" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>QUERIES AND ANSWERS</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[From <i>The Rolling Stone</i>, June 23, 1894.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-24" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">QUERIES AND ANSWERS</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>From <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Rolling Stone</i>, June 23, 1894.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p class="jus">Can you inform me where I can buy an interest in a newspaper of some kind? I have some money and would be glad to invest it in something of the sort, if some one would allow me to put in my capital against his experience.</p>
|
||||
<p class="jright"><span class="smallcaps">College Graduate</span>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Telegraph us your address at once, day message. Keep telegraphing every ten minutes at our expense until we see you. Will start on first train after receiving your wire.</p>
|
||||
@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
|
||||
<p class="jus"></p>
|
||||
<p class="jus">Please state what the seven wonders of the world are. I know five of them, I think, but can’t find out the other two.</p>
|
||||
<p class="jright"><span class="smallcaps">Scholar</span>.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Temple of Diana, at Lexington, Ky.; the Great Wall of China; Judge Von Rosenberg (the Colossus of Roads); the Hanging Gardens at Albany; a San Antonio Sunday school; Mrs. Frank Leslie, and the Populist party.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Temple of Diana, at Lexington, Ky.; the Great Wall of China; Judge Von Rosenberg (the Colossus of Roads); the Hanging Gardens at Albany; a San Antonio Sunday school; <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Frank Leslie, and the Populist party.</p>
|
||||
<hr class="tiny"/>
|
||||
<p class="jus"></p>
|
||||
<p class="jus">What day did Christmas come on in the year 1847?</p>
|
||||
@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
|
||||
<p>The 25th of December.</p>
|
||||
<hr class="tiny"/>
|
||||
<p class="jus"></p>
|
||||
<p class="jus">What does an F. F. V. mean?</p>
|
||||
<p class="jus">What does an F. F. <span epub:type="z3998:roman">V</span>. mean?</p>
|
||||
<p class="jright"><span class="smallcaps">Ignorant</span>.</p>
|
||||
<p>What does he mean by what? If he takes you by the arm and tells you how much you are like a brother of his in Richmond, he means Feel For Your Vest, for he wants to borrow a five. If he holds his head high and don’t speak to you on the street he means that he already owes you ten and is Following a Fresh Victim.</p>
|
||||
<hr class="tiny"/>
|
||||
@ -65,7 +65,7 @@
|
||||
<p class="jus"></p>
|
||||
<p class="jus">Has a married woman any rights in Texas?</p>
|
||||
<p class="jright"><span class="smallcaps">Prospector</span>.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hush, Mr. Prospector. Not quite so loud, if you please. Come up to the office some afternoon, and if everything seems quiet, come inside, and look at our eye, and our suspenders hanging on to one button, and feel the lump on the top of our head. Yes, she has some rights of her own, and everybody else’s she can scoop in.</p>
|
||||
<p>Hush, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Prospector. Not quite so loud, if you please. Come up to the office some afternoon, and if everything seems quiet, come inside, and look at our eye, and our suspenders hanging on to one button, and feel the lump on the top of our head. Yes, she has some rights of her own, and everybody else’s she can scoop in.</p>
|
||||
<hr class="tiny"/>
|
||||
<p class="jus"></p>
|
||||
<p class="jus">Who was the author of the sayings, “A public office is a public trust,” and “I would rather be right than President”?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
|
||||
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
|
||||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||||
<head>
|
||||
<title>Chapter 25</title>
|
||||
<title>Endnotes</title>
|
||||
<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-25" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>Footnotes</h2>
|
||||
<section id="endnotes" epub:type="endnotes">
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">Endnotes</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote class="footnote">
|
||||
<p class="noindent"><a name="footnote1"/><b>Footnote 1</b>:</p>
|
||||
<p>O. Henry</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>A RULER OF MEN</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Written at the prime of his popularity and power, this characteristic and amusing story was published in <i>Everybody’s Magazine</i> in August, 1906.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-3" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A RULER OF MEN</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Written at the prime of his popularity and power, this characteristic and amusing story was published in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Everybody’s Magazine</i> in August, 1906.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header
|
||||
<p>I walked the streets of the City of Insolence, thirsting for the sight of a stranger face. For the City is a desert of familiar types as thick and alike as the grains in a sand-storm; and you grow to hate them as you do a friend who is always by you, or one of your own kin.</p>
|
||||
<p>And my desire was granted, for I saw near a corner of Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street, a little flaxen-haired man with a face like a scaly-bark hickory-nut, selling to a fast-gathering crowd a tool that omnigeneously proclaimed itself a can-opener, a screw-driver, a button-hook, a nail-file, a shoe-horn, a watch-guard, a potato-peeler, and an ornament to any gentleman’s key-ring.</p>
|
||||
<p>And then a stall-fed cop shoved himself through the congregation of customers. The vender, plainly used to having his seasons of trade thus abruptly curtailed, closed his satchel and slipped like a weasel through the opposite segment of the circle. The crowd scurried aimlessly away like ants from a disturbed crumb. The cop, suddenly becoming oblivious of the earth and its inhabitants, stood still, swelling his bulk and putting his club through an intricate drill of twirls. I hurried after Kansas Bill Bowers, and caught him by an arm.</p>
|
||||
@ -78,7 +78,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“As I passed the window I glanced inside and caught a glimpse of a white dress and a pair of big, flashing black eyes and gleaming teeth under a dark lace mantilla.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When we got back to our house O’Connor began to walk up and down the floor and twist his moustaches.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Did ye see her eyes, Bowers?’ he asks me.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I did,’ says I, ‘and I can see more than that. It’s all coming out according to the story-books. I knew there was something missing. ’Twas the love interest. What is it that comes in Chapter VII to cheer the gallant Irish adventurer? Why, Love, of course—Love that makes the hat go around. At last we have the eyes of midnight hue and the rose flung from the barred window. Now, what comes next? The underground passage—the intercepted letter—the traitor in camp—the hero thrown into a dungeon—the mysterious message from the señorita—then the outburst—the fighting on the plaza—the—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I did,’ says I, ‘and I can see more than that. It’s all coming out according to the story-books. I knew there was something missing. ’Twas the love interest. What is it that comes in Chapter <span epub:type="z3998:roman">VII</span> to cheer the gallant Irish adventurer? Why, Love, of course—Love that makes the hat go around. At last we have the eyes of midnight hue and the rose flung from the barred window. Now, what comes next? The underground passage—the intercepted letter—the traitor in camp—the hero thrown into a dungeon—the mysterious message from the señorita—then the outburst—the fighting on the plaza—the—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ says O’Connor, interrupting. ‘But that’s the only woman in the world for me, Bowers. The O’Connors are as quick to love as they are to fight. I shall wear that rose over me heart when I lead me men into action. For a good battle to be fought there must be some woman to give it power.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Every time,’ I agreed, ‘if you want to have a good lively scrap. There’s only one thing bothering me. In the novels the light-haired friend of the hero always gets killed. Think ’em all over that you’ve read, and you’ll see that I’m right. I think I’ll step down to the Botica Española and lay in a bottle of walnut stain before war is declared.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How will I find out her name?’ says O’Connor, layin’ his chin in his hand.</p>
|
||||
@ -119,7 +119,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“In the afternoon the interpreter came around and smiled as he laid his hand on the big red jar we usually kept ice-water in.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘The ice-man didn’t call to-day,’ says I. ‘What’s the matter with everything, Sancho?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ah, yes,’ says the liver-colored linguist. ‘They just tell me in the town. Verree bad act that Señor O’Connor make fight with General Tumbalo. Yes, general Tumbalo great soldier and big mans.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’ll they do to Mr. O’Connor?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’ll they do to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> O’Connor?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I talk little while presently with the Juez de la Paz—what you call Justice-with-the-peace,’ says Sancho. ‘He tell me it verree bad crime that one Señor Americano try kill General Tumbalo. He say they keep señor O’Connor in jail six months; then have trial and shoot him with guns. Verree sorree.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How about this revolution that was to be pulled off?’ I asks.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says this Sancho, ‘I think too hot weather for revolution. Revolution better in winter-time. Maybe so next winter. Quien sabe?’</p>
|
||||
@ -149,7 +149,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“I caught hold of his arm.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Don’t look it up,’ says I. ‘Marriage is a lottery anyway. I’m willing to take the risk about the license if you are.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The consul went back to Hooligan Alley with me. Izzy called her ma to come in, but the old lady was picking a chicken in the patio and begged to be excused. So we stood up and the consul performed the ceremony.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That evening Mrs. Bowers cooked a great supper of stewed goat, tamales, baked bananas, fricasseed red peppers and coffee. Afterward I sat in the rocking-chair by the front window, and she sat on the floor plunking at a guitar and happy, as she should be, as Mrs. William T. B.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That evening <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bowers cooked a great supper of stewed goat, tamales, baked bananas, fricasseed red peppers and coffee. Afterward I sat in the rocking-chair by the front window, and she sat on the floor plunking at a guitar and happy, as she should be, as <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> William T. B.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All at once I sprang up in a hurry. I’d forgotten all about O’Connor. I asked Izzy to fix up a lot of truck for him to eat.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘That big, oogly man,’ said Izzy. ‘But all right—he your friend.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I pulled a rose out of a bunch in a jar, and took the grub-basket around to the jail. O’Connor ate like a wolf. Then he wiped his face with a banana peel and said: ‘Have you heard nothing from Dona Isabel yet?’</p>
|
||||
@ -157,11 +157,11 @@
|
||||
<p>“O’Connor pressed the rose to his lips. “ ‘This is more to me than all the food in the world,’ says he. ‘But the supper was fine. Where did you raise it?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I’ve negotiated a stand-off at a delicatessen hut downtown,’ I tells him. ‘Rest easy. If there’s anything to be done I’ll do it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So things went along that way for some weeks. Izzy was a great cook; and if she had had a little more poise of character and smoked a little better brand of tobacco we might have drifted into some sense of responsibility for the honor I had conferred on her. But as time went on I began to hunger for the sight of a real lady standing before me in a street-car. All I was staying in that land of bilk and money for was because I couldn’t get away, and I thought it no more than decent to stay and see O’Connor shot.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One day our old interpreter drops around and after smoking an hour says that the judge of the peace sent him to request me to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro’s cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading Mrs. Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish by the help of Izzy, and I began to remark in a rich Andalusian brogue:</p>
|
||||
<p>“One day our old interpreter drops around and after smoking an hour says that the judge of the peace sent him to request me to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro’s cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish by the help of Izzy, and I began to remark in a rich Andalusian brogue:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Buenas dias, señor. Yo tengo—yo tengo—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh, sit down, Mr. Bowers,’ says he. ‘I spent eight years in your country in colleges and law schools. Let me mix you a highball. Lemon peel, or not?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Oh, sit down, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bowers,’ says he. ‘I spent eight years in your country in colleges and law schools. Let me mix you a highball. Lemon peel, or not?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Thus we got along. In about half an hour I was beginning to tell him about the scandal in our family when Aunt Elvira ran away with a Cumberland Presbyterian preacher. Then he says to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I sent for you, Mr. Bowers, to let you know that you can have your friend Mr. O’Connor now. Of course we had to make a show of punishing him on account of his attack on General Tumbalo. It is arranged that he shall be released to-morrow night. You and he will be conveyed on board the fruit steamer Voyager, bound for New York, which lies in the harbor. Your passage will be arranged for.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I sent for you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bowers, to let you know that you can have your friend <abbr>Mr.</abbr> O’Connor now. Of course we had to make a show of punishing him on account of his attack on General Tumbalo. It is arranged that he shall be released to-morrow night. You and he will be conveyed on board the fruit steamer Voyager, bound for New York, which lies in the harbor. Your passage will be arranged for.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘One moment, judge,’ says I; ‘that revolution—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The judge lays back in his chair and howls.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he presently, ‘that was all a little joke fixed up by the boys around the court-room, and one or two of our cut-ups, and a few clerks in the stores. The town is bursting its sides with laughing. The boys made themselves up to be conspirators, and they—what you call it?—stick Señor O’Connor for his money. It is very funny.’</p>
|
||||
@ -172,7 +172,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“The great, mellow, tropical moon was rising as we steamed away. O’Connor leaned on the taffrail or rear balcony of the ship and gazed silently at Guaya—at Buncoville-on-the-Beach.</p>
|
||||
<p>“He had the red rose in his hand.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘She will wait,’ I heard him say. ‘Eyes like hers never deceive. But I shall see her again. Traitors cannot keep an O’Connor down forever.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You talk like a sequel,’ says I. ‘But in Volume II please omit the light-haired friend who totes the grub to the hero in his dungeon cell.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You talk like a sequel,’ says I. ‘But in Volume <span epub:type="z3998:roman">II</span> please omit the light-haired friend who totes the grub to the hero in his dungeon cell.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“And thus reminiscing, we came back to New York.”</p>
|
||||
<p>There was a little silence broken only by the familiar roar of the streets after Kansas Bill Bowers ceased talking.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Did O’Connor ever go back?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE ATAVISM OF JOHN TOM LITTLE BEAR</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[O. Henry thought this the best of the Jeff Peters stories, all the rest of which are included in “The Gentle Grafter,” except “Cupid à la Carte” in the “Heart of the West.” “The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear” appeared in <i>Everybody’s Magazine</i> for July, 1903.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-4" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE ATAVISM OF JOHN TOM LITTLE BEAR</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>O. Henry thought this the best of the Jeff Peters stories, all the rest of which are included in “The Gentle Grafter,” except “Cupid à la Carte” in the “Heart of the West.” “The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear” appeared in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Everybody’s Magazine</i> for July, 1903.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>I saw a light in Jeff Peters’s room over the Red Front Drug Store. I hastened toward it, for I had not known that Jeff was in town. He is a man of the Hadji breed, of a hundred occupations, with a story to tell (when he will) of each one.</p>
|
||||
<p>I found Jeff repacking his grip for a run down to Florida to look at an orange grove for which he had traded, a month before, his mining claim on the Yukon. He kicked me a chair, with the same old humorous, profound smile on his seasoned countenance. It had been eight months since we had met, but his greeting was such as men pass from day to day. Time is Jeff’s servant, and the continent is a big lot across which he cuts to his many roads.</p>
|
||||
<p>For a while we skirmished along the edges of unprofitable talk which culminated in that unquiet problem of the Philippines.</p>
|
||||
@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“O-ho!” sang Jeff, lighting his pipe (which was a good sign). “Yes, the Indian! I’m looking. I hasten to contemplate the redman as a standard bearer of progress. He’s the same as the other brown boys. You can’t make an Anglo-Saxon of him. Did I ever tell you about the time my friend John Tom Little Bear bit off the right ear of the arts of culture and education and spun the teetotum back round to where it was when Columbus was a little boy? I did not?</p>
|
||||
<p>“John Tom Little Bear was an educated Cherokee Indian and an old friend of mine when I was in the Territories. He was a graduate of one of them Eastern football colleges that have been so successful in teaching the Indian to use the gridiron instead of burning his victims at the stake. As an Anglo-Saxon, John Tom was copper-colored in spots. As an Indian, he was one of the whitest men I ever knew. As a Cherokee, he was a gentleman on the first ballot. As a ward of the nation, he was mighty hard to carry at the primaries.</p>
|
||||
<p>“John Tom and me got together and began to make medicine—how to get up some lawful, genteel swindle which we might work in a quiet way so as not to excite the stupidity of the police or the cupidity of the larger corporations. We had close upon $500 between us, and we pined to make it grow, as all respectable capitalists do.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And inside of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan. John Tom is Chief Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem of the Seven Tribes. Mr. Peters is business manager and half owner. We needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This Binkly has a disease for Shakespearian rôles, and an hallucination about a 200 nights’ run on the New York stage. But he confesses that he never could earn the butter to spread on his William S. rôles, so he is willing to drop to the ordinary baker’s kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile run behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard III, he could do twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook, and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of excuses for taking money. One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers, Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the Kansasters that had the department stores reduced to a decimal fraction. Look ye! A pair of silk garters, a dream book, one dozen clothespins, a gold tooth, and ‘When Knighthood Was in Flower’ all wrapped up in a genuine Japanese silkarina handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady by Mr. Peters for the trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly entertains us in a three-minute round with the banjo.</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And inside of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan. John Tom is Chief Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem of the Seven Tribes. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters is business manager and half owner. We needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This Binkly has a disease for Shakespearian rôles, and an hallucination about a 200 nights’ run on the New York stage. But he confesses that he never could earn the butter to spread on his William S. rôles, so he is willing to drop to the ordinary baker’s kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile run behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard <span epub:type="z3998:roman">III</span>, he could do twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook, and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of excuses for taking money. One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers, Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the Kansasters that had the department stores reduced to a decimal fraction. Look ye! A pair of silk garters, a dream book, one dozen clothespins, a gold tooth, and ‘When Knighthood Was in Flower’ all wrapped up in a genuine Japanese silkarina handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady by <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters for the trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly entertains us in a three-minute round with the banjo.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ’Twas an eminent graft we had. We ravaged peacefully through the State, determined to remove all doubt as to why ’twas called bleeding Kansas. John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief’s costume, drew crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones. While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and hyperæsthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn’t hand out the Indian Remedy fast enough for ’em.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One night we was camped on the edge of a little town out west of Salina. We always camped near a stream, and put up a little tent. Sometimes we sold out of the Remedy unexpected, and then Chief Wish-Heap-Dough would have a dream in which the Manitou commanded him to fill up a few bottles of Sum-wah-tah at the most convenient place. ’Twas about ten o’clock, and we’d just got in from a street performance. I was in the tent with the lantern, figuring up the day’s profits. John Tom hadn’t taken off his Indian make-up, and was sitting by the campfire minding a fine sirloin steak in the pan for the Professor till he finished his hair-raising scene with the trained horses.</p>
|
||||
<p>“All at once out of dark bushes comes a pop like a firecracker, and John Tom gives a grunt and digs out of his bosom a little bullet that has dented itself against his collar-bone. John Tom makes a dive in the direction of the fireworks, and comes back dragging by the collar a kid about nine or ten years young, in a velveteen suit, with a little nickel-mounted rifle in his hand about as big as a fountain-pen.</p>
|
||||
@ -38,47 +38,47 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You never mind,’ says John Tom, ‘whether I’m a cigar-sign or a Tammany cartoon. The question before the council is what’s to be done with you. You’ve run away from home. You’ve been reading Howells. You’ve disgraced the profession of boy avengers by trying to shoot a tame Indian, and never saying: “Die, dog of a redskin! You have crossed the path of the Boy Avenger nineteen times too often.” What do you mean by it?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The kid thought for a minute. ‘I guess I made a mistake,’ he says. ‘I ought to have gone farther west. They find ’em wild out there in the canyons.’ He holds out his hand to John Tom, the little rascal. ‘Please excuse me, sir,’ says he, ‘for shooting at you. I hope it didn’t hurt you. But you ought to be more careful. When a scout sees a Indian in his war-dress, his rifle must speak.’ Little Bear give a big laugh with a whoop at the end of it, and swings the kid ten feet high and sets him on his shoulder, and the runaway fingers the fringe and the eagle feathers and is full of the joy the white man knows when he dangles his heels against an inferior race. It is plain that Little Bear and that kid are chums from that on. The little renegade has already smoked the pipe of peace with the savage; and you can see in his eye that he is figuring on a tomahawk and a pair of moccasins, children’s size.</p>
|
||||
<p>“We have supper in the tent. The youngster looks upon me and the Professor as ordinary braves, only intended as a background to the camp scene. When he is seated on a box of Sum-wah-tah, with the edge of the table sawing his neck, and his mouth full of beefsteak, Little Bear calls for his name. ‘Roy,’ says the kid, with a sirloiny sound to it. But when the rest of it and his post-office address is referred to, he shakes his head. ‘I guess not,’ he says. ‘You’ll send me back. I want to stay with you. I like this camping out. At home, we fellows had a camp in our back yard. They called me Roy, the Red Wolf! I guess that’ll do for a name. Gimme another piece of beefsteak, please.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“We had to keep that kid. We knew there was a hullabaloo about him somewheres, and that Mamma, and Uncle Harry, and Aunt Jane, and the Chief of Police were hot after finding his trail, but not another word would he tell us. In two days he was the mascot of the Big Medicine outfit, and all of us had a sneaking hope that his owners wouldn’t turn up. When the red wagon was doing business he was in it, and passed up the bottles to Mr. Peters as proud and satisfied as a prince that’s abjured a two-hundred-dollar crown for a million-dollar parvenuess. Once John Tom asked him something about his papa. ‘I ain’t got any papa,’ he says. ‘He runned away and left us. He made my mamma cry. Aunt Lucy says he’s a shape.’ ‘A what?’ somebody asks him. ‘A shape,’ says the kid; ‘some kind of a shape—lemme see—oh, yes, a feendenuman shape. I don’t know what it means.’ John Tom was for putting our brand on him, and dressing him up like a little chief, with wampum and beads, but I vetoes it. ‘Somebody’s lost that kid, is my view of it, and they may want him. You let me try him with a few stratagems, and see if I can’t get a look at his visiting-card.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So that night I goes up to Mr. Roy Blank by the camp-fire, and looks at him contemptuous and scornful. ‘Snickenwitzel!’ says I, like the word made me sick; ‘Snickenwitzel! Bah! Before I’d be named Snickenwitzel!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“We had to keep that kid. We knew there was a hullabaloo about him somewheres, and that Mamma, and Uncle Harry, and Aunt Jane, and the Chief of Police were hot after finding his trail, but not another word would he tell us. In two days he was the mascot of the Big Medicine outfit, and all of us had a sneaking hope that his owners wouldn’t turn up. When the red wagon was doing business he was in it, and passed up the bottles to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters as proud and satisfied as a prince that’s abjured a two-hundred-dollar crown for a million-dollar parvenuess. Once John Tom asked him something about his papa. ‘I ain’t got any papa,’ he says. ‘He runned away and left us. He made my mamma cry. Aunt Lucy says he’s a shape.’ ‘A what?’ somebody asks him. ‘A shape,’ says the kid; ‘some kind of a shape—lemme see—oh, yes, a feendenuman shape. I don’t know what it means.’ John Tom was for putting our brand on him, and dressing him up like a little chief, with wampum and beads, but I vetoes it. ‘Somebody’s lost that kid, is my view of it, and they may want him. You let me try him with a few stratagems, and see if I can’t get a look at his visiting-card.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So that night I goes up to <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Roy Blank by the camp-fire, and looks at him contemptuous and scornful. ‘Snickenwitzel!’ says I, like the word made me sick; ‘Snickenwitzel! Bah! Before I’d be named Snickenwitzel!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What’s the matter with you, Jeff?’ says the kid, opening his eyes wide.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Snickenwitzel!’ I repeats, and I spat, the word out. ‘I saw a man to-day from your town, and he told me your name. I’m not surprised you was ashamed to tell it. Snickenwitzel! Whew!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ah, here, now,’ says the boy, indignant and wriggling all over, ‘what’s the matter with you? That ain’t my name. It’s Conyers. What’s the matter with you?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ I went on quick, keeping him hot and not giving him time to think. ‘We thought you was from a nice, well-to-do family. Here’s Mr. Little Bear, a chief of the Cherokees, entitled to wear nine otter tails on his Sunday blanket, and Professor Binkly, who plays Shakespeare and the banjo, and me, that’s got hundreds of dollars in that black tin box in the wagon, and we’ve got to be careful about the company we keep. That man tells me your folks live ‘way down in little old Hencoop Alley, where there are no sidewalks, and the goats eat off the table with you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ I went on quick, keeping him hot and not giving him time to think. ‘We thought you was from a nice, well-to-do family. Here’s <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear, a chief of the Cherokees, entitled to wear nine otter tails on his Sunday blanket, and Professor Binkly, who plays Shakespeare and the banjo, and me, that’s got hundreds of dollars in that black tin box in the wagon, and we’ve got to be careful about the company we keep. That man tells me your folks live ‘way down in little old Hencoop Alley, where there are no sidewalks, and the goats eat off the table with you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“That kid was almost crying now. ”Taint so,’ he splutters. ‘He—he don’t know what he’s talking about. We live on Poplar Av’noo. I don’t ‘sociate with goats. What’s the matter with you?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Poplar Avenue,’ says I, sarcastic. ‘Poplar Avenue! That’s a street to live on! It only runs two blocks and then falls off a bluff. You can throw a keg of nails the whole length of it. Don’t talk to me about Poplar Avenue.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It’s—it’s miles long,’ says the kid. ‘Our number’s 862 and there’s lots of houses after that. What’s the matter with—aw, you make me tired, Jeff.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, well, now,’ says I. ‘I guess that man made a mistake. Maybe it was some other boy he was talking about. If I catch him I’ll teach him to go around slandering people.’ And after supper I goes up town and telegraphs to Mrs. Conyers, 862 Poplar Avenue, Quincy, Ill., that the kid is safe and sassy with us, and will be held for further orders. In two hours an answer comes to hold him tight, and she’ll start for him by next train.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next train was due at 6 <span class="smallcaps">p.m.</span> the next day, and me and John Tom was at the depot with the kid. You might scour the plains in vain for the big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough. In his place is Mr. Little Bear in the human habiliments of the Anglo-Saxon sect; and the leather of his shoes is patented and the loop of his necktie is copyrighted. For these things John Tom had grafted on him at college along with metaphysics and the knockout guard for the low tackle. But for his complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of his straight hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out of the city directory that subscribes for magazines and pushes the lawn-mower in his shirt-sleeves of evenings.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then the train rolled in, and a little woman in a gray dress, with sort of illuminating hair, slides off and looks around quick. And the Boy Avenger sees her, and yells ‘Mamma,’ and she cries ‘O!’ and they meet in a clinch, and now the pesky redskins can come forth from their caves on the plains without fear any more of the rifle of Roy, the Red Wolf. Mrs. Conyers comes up and thanks me an’ John Tom without the usual extremities you always look for in a woman. She says just enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the orchestra. I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known me a week. And then Mr. Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech. I could see the kid’s mother didn’t quite place John Tom; but it seemed she was apprised in his dialects, and she played up to his lead in the science of making three words do the work of one.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, well, now,’ says I. ‘I guess that man made a mistake. Maybe it was some other boy he was talking about. If I catch him I’ll teach him to go around slandering people.’ And after supper I goes up town and telegraphs to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers, 862 Poplar Avenue, Quincy, Ill., that the kid is safe and sassy with us, and will be held for further orders. In two hours an answer comes to hold him tight, and she’ll start for him by next train.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The next train was due at 6 <span class="smallcaps"><abbr class="time">p.m.</abbr></span> the next day, and me and John Tom was at the depot with the kid. You might scour the plains in vain for the big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough. In his place is <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear in the human habiliments of the Anglo-Saxon sect; and the leather of his shoes is patented and the loop of his necktie is copyrighted. For these things John Tom had grafted on him at college along with metaphysics and the knockout guard for the low tackle. But for his complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of his straight hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out of the city directory that subscribes for magazines and pushes the lawn-mower in his shirt-sleeves of evenings.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Then the train rolled in, and a little woman in a gray dress, with sort of illuminating hair, slides off and looks around quick. And the Boy Avenger sees her, and yells ‘Mamma,’ and she cries ‘O!’ and they meet in a clinch, and now the pesky redskins can come forth from their caves on the plains without fear any more of the rifle of Roy, the Red Wolf. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers comes up and thanks me an’ John Tom without the usual extremities you always look for in a woman. She says just enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the orchestra. I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known me a week. And then <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech. I could see the kid’s mother didn’t quite place John Tom; but it seemed she was apprised in his dialects, and she played up to his lead in the science of making three words do the work of one.</p>
|
||||
<p>“That kid introduced us, with some footnotes and explanations that made things plainer than a week of rhetoric. He danced around, and punched us in the back, and tried to climb John Tom’s leg. ‘This is John Tom, mamma,’ says he. ‘He’s a Indian. He sells medicine in a red wagon. I shot him, but he wasn’t wild. The other one’s Jeff. He’s a fakir, too. Come on and see the camp where we live, won’t you, mamma?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is plain to see that the life of the woman is in that boy. She has got him again where her arms can gather him, and that’s enough. She’s ready to do anything to please him. She hesitates the eighth of a second and takes another look at these men. I imagine she says to herself about John Tom, ‘Seems to be a gentleman, if his hair don’t curl.’ And Mr. Peters she disposes of as follows: ‘No ladies’ man, but a man who knows a lady.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is plain to see that the life of the woman is in that boy. She has got him again where her arms can gather him, and that’s enough. She’s ready to do anything to please him. She hesitates the eighth of a second and takes another look at these men. I imagine she says to herself about John Tom, ‘Seems to be a gentleman, if his hair don’t curl.’ And <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters she disposes of as follows: ‘No ladies’ man, but a man who knows a lady.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So we all rambled down to the camp as neighborly as coming from a wake. And there she inspects the wagon and pats the place with her hand where the kid used to sleep, and dabs around her eyewinkers with her handkerchief. And Professor Binkly gives us ‘Trovatore’ on one string of the banjo, and is about to slide off into Hamlet’s monologue when one of the horses gets tangled in his rope and he must go look after him, and says something about ‘foiled again.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“When it got dark me and John Tom walked back up to the Corn Exchange Hotel, and the four of us had supper there. I think the trouble started at that supper, for then was when Mr. Little Bear made an intellectual balloon ascension. I held on to the tablecloth, and listened to him soar. That redman, if I could judge, had the gift of information. He took language, and did with it all a Roman can do with macaroni. His vocal remarks was all embroidered over with the most scholarly verbs and prefixes. And his syllables was smooth, and fitted nicely to the joints of his idea. I thought I’d heard him talk before, but I hadn’t. And it wasn’t the size of his words, but the way they come; and ‘twasn’t his subjects, for he spoke of common things like cathedrals and football and poems and catarrh and souls and freight rates and sculpture. Mrs. Conyers understood his accents, and the elegant sounds went back and forth between ’em. And now and then Jefferson D. Peters would intervene a few shop-worn, senseless words to have the butter passed or another leg of the chicken.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, John Tom Little Bear appeared to be inveigled some in his bosom about that Mrs. Conyers. She was of the kind that pleases. She had the good looks and more, I’ll tell you. You take one of these cloak models in a big store. They strike you as being on the impersonal system. They are adapted for the eye. What they run to is inches around and complexion, and the art of fanning the delusion that the sealskin would look just as well on the lady with the warts and the pocket-book. Now, if one of them models was off duty, and you took it, and it would say ‘Charlie’ when you pressed it, and sit up at the table, why, then you would have something similar to Mrs. Conyers. I could see how John Tom could resist any inclination to hate that white squaw.</p>
|
||||
<p>“When it got dark me and John Tom walked back up to the Corn Exchange Hotel, and the four of us had supper there. I think the trouble started at that supper, for then was when <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear made an intellectual balloon ascension. I held on to the tablecloth, and listened to him soar. That redman, if I could judge, had the gift of information. He took language, and did with it all a Roman can do with macaroni. His vocal remarks was all embroidered over with the most scholarly verbs and prefixes. And his syllables was smooth, and fitted nicely to the joints of his idea. I thought I’d heard him talk before, but I hadn’t. And it wasn’t the size of his words, but the way they come; and ‘twasn’t his subjects, for he spoke of common things like cathedrals and football and poems and catarrh and souls and freight rates and sculpture. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers understood his accents, and the elegant sounds went back and forth between ’em. And now and then Jefferson D. Peters would intervene a few shop-worn, senseless words to have the butter passed or another leg of the chicken.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Yes, John Tom Little Bear appeared to be inveigled some in his bosom about that <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers. She was of the kind that pleases. She had the good looks and more, I’ll tell you. You take one of these cloak models in a big store. They strike you as being on the impersonal system. They are adapted for the eye. What they run to is inches around and complexion, and the art of fanning the delusion that the sealskin would look just as well on the lady with the warts and the pocket-book. Now, if one of them models was off duty, and you took it, and it would say ‘Charlie’ when you pressed it, and sit up at the table, why, then you would have something similar to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers. I could see how John Tom could resist any inclination to hate that white squaw.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The lady and the kid stayed at the hotel. In the morning, they say, they will start for home. Me and Little Bear left at eight o’clock, and sold Indian Remedy on the courthouse square till nine. He leaves me and the Professor to drive down to camp, while he stays up town. I am not enamored with that plan, for it shows John Tom is uneasy in his composures, and that leads to firewater, and sometimes to the green corn dance and costs. Not often does Chief Wish-Heap-Dough get busy with the firewater, but whenever he does there is heap much doing in the lodges of the palefaces who wear blue and carry the club.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At half-past nine Professor Binkly is rolled in his quilt snoring in blank verse, and I am sitting by the fire listening to the frogs. Mr. Little Bear slides into camp and sits down against a tree. There is no symptoms of firewater.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At half-past nine Professor Binkly is rolled in his quilt snoring in blank verse, and I am sitting by the fire listening to the frogs. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear slides into camp and sits down against a tree. There is no symptoms of firewater.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, after a long time, ‘a little boy came West to hunt Indians.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, then?’ says I, for I wasn’t thinking as he was.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘And he bagged one,’ says John Tom, ‘and ’twas not with a gun, and he never had on a velveteen suit of clothes in his life.’ And then I began to catch his smoke.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I know it,’ says I. ‘And I’ll bet you his pictures are on valentines, and fool men are his game, red and white.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You win on the red,’ says John Tom, calm. ‘Jeff, for how many ponies do you think I could buy Mrs. Conyers?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You win on the red,’ says John Tom, calm. ‘Jeff, for how many ponies do you think I could buy <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Scandalous talk!’ I replies. ”Tis not a paleface custom.’ John Tom laughs loud and bites into a cigar. ‘No,’ he answers; ”tis the savage equivalent for the dollars of the white man’s marriage settlement. Oh, I know. There’s an eternal wall between the races. If I could do it, Jeff, I’d put a torch to every white college that a redman has ever set foot inside. Why don’t you leave us alone,’ he says, ‘to our own ghost-dances and dog-feasts, and our dingy squaws to cook our grasshopper soup and darn our moccasins?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Now, you sure don’t mean disrespect to the perennial blossom entitled education?’ says I, scandalized, ‘because I wear it in the bosom of my own intellectual shirt-waist. I’ve had education,’ says I, ‘and never took any harm from it.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You lasso us,’ goes on Little Bear, not noticing my prose insertions, ‘and teach us what is beautiful in literature and in life, and how to appreciate what is fine in men and women. What have you done to me?’ says he. ‘You’ve made me a Cherokee Moses. You’ve taught me to hate the wigwams and love the white man’s ways. I can look over into the promised land and see Mrs. Conyers, but my place is—on the reservation.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You lasso us,’ goes on Little Bear, not noticing my prose insertions, ‘and teach us what is beautiful in literature and in life, and how to appreciate what is fine in men and women. What have you done to me?’ says he. ‘You’ve made me a Cherokee Moses. You’ve taught me to hate the wigwams and love the white man’s ways. I can look over into the promised land and see <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers, but my place is—on the reservation.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Little Bear stands up in his chief’s dress, and laughs again. ‘But, white man Jeff,’ he goes on, ‘the paleface provides a recourse. ’Tis a temporary one, but it gives a respite and the name of it is whiskey.’ And straight off he walks up the path to town again. ‘Now,’ says I in my mind, ‘may the Manitou move him to do only bailable things this night!’ For I perceive that John Tom is about to avail himself of the white man’s solace.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maybe it was 10:30, as I sat smoking, when I hear pit-a-pats on the path, and here comes Mrs. Conyers running, her hair twisted up any way, and a look on her face that says burglars and mice and the flour’s-all-out rolled in one. ‘Oh, Mr. Peters,’ she calls out, as they will, ‘oh, oh!’ I made a quick think, and I spoke the gist of it out loud. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘we’ve been brothers, me and that Indian, but I’ll make a good one of him in two minutes if—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘No, no,’ she says, wild and cracking her knuckles, ‘I haven’t seen Mr. Little Bear. ’Tis my—husband. He’s stolen my boy. Oh,’ she says, ‘just when I had him back in my arms again! That heartless villain! Every bitterness life knows,’ she says, ‘he’s made me drink. My poor little lamb, that ought to be warm in his bed, carried of by that fiend!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Maybe it was 10:30, as I sat smoking, when I hear pit-a-pats on the path, and here comes <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers running, her hair twisted up any way, and a look on her face that says burglars and mice and the flour’s-all-out rolled in one. ‘Oh, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ she calls out, as they will, ‘oh, oh!’ I made a quick think, and I spoke the gist of it out loud. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘we’ve been brothers, me and that Indian, but I’ll make a good one of him in two minutes if—’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘No, no,’ she says, wild and cracking her knuckles, ‘I haven’t seen <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear. ’Tis my—husband. He’s stolen my boy. Oh,’ she says, ‘just when I had him back in my arms again! That heartless villain! Every bitterness life knows,’ she says, ‘he’s made me drink. My poor little lamb, that ought to be warm in his bed, carried of by that fiend!’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How did all this happen?’ I ask. ‘Let’s have the facts.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘I was fixing his bed,’ she explains, ‘and Roy was playing on the hotel porch and he drives up to the steps. I heard Roy scream, and ran out. My husband had him in the buggy then. I begged him for my child. This is what he gave me.’ She turns her face to the light. There is a crimson streak running across her cheek and mouth. ‘He did that with his whip,’ she says.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Come back to the hotel,’ says I, ‘and we’ll see what can be done.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“On the way she tells me some of the wherefores. When he slashed her with the whip he told her he found out she was coming for the kid, and he was on the same train. Mrs. Conyers had been living with her brother, and they’d watched the boy always, as her husband had tried to steal him before. I judge that man was worse than a street railway promoter. It seems he had spent her money and slugged her and killed her canary bird, and told it around that she had cold feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At the hotel we found a mass meeting of five infuriated citizens chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage. Most of the town was asleep by ten o’clock. I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I will take the one o’clock train for the next town, forty miles east, for it is likely that the esteemed Mr. Conyers will drive there to take the cars. ‘I don’t know,’ I tells her, ‘but what he has legal rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace proposition.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mrs. Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord’s wife, who is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the poor dear. The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one suspender, and says to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“On the way she tells me some of the wherefores. When he slashed her with the whip he told her he found out she was coming for the kid, and he was on the same train. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers had been living with her brother, and they’d watched the boy always, as her husband had tried to steal him before. I judge that man was worse than a street railway promoter. It seems he had spent her money and slugged her and killed her canary bird, and told it around that she had cold feet.</p>
|
||||
<p>“At the hotel we found a mass meeting of five infuriated citizens chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage. Most of the town was asleep by ten o’clock. I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I will take the one o’clock train for the next town, forty miles east, for it is likely that the esteemed <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Conyers will drive there to take the cars. ‘I don’t know,’ I tells her, ‘but what he has legal rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace proposition.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord’s wife, who is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the poor dear. The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one suspender, and says to me:</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Ain’t had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall’s wife swallered a spring lizard. I seen him through the winder hit her with the buggy whip, and everything. What’s that suit of clothes cost you you got on? ‘Pears like we’d have some rain, don’t it? Say, doc, that Indian of yorn’s on a kind of a whizz to-night, ain’t he? He comes along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. He gives a cur’us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our constable ‘ll have him in the lock-up ‘fore morning.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought I’d sit on the porch and wait for the one o’clock train. I wasn’t feeling saturated with mirth. Here was John Tom on one of his sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me. But then, I’m always having trouble with other people’s troubles. Every few minutes Mrs. Conyers would come out on the porch and look down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand. Now, wasn’t that like a woman? And that brings up cats. ‘I saw a mouse go in this hole,’ says Mrs. Cat; ‘you can go prize up a plank over there if you like; I’ll watch this hole.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“About a quarter to one o’clock the lady comes out again, restless, crying easy, as females do for their own amusement, and she looks down that road again and listens. ‘Now, ma’am,’ says I, ‘there’s no use watching cold wheel-tracks. By this time they’re halfway to—’ ‘Hush,’ she says, holding up her hand. And I do hear something coming ‘flip-flap’ in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinée. And up the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian. The lamp in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize Mr. J. T. Little Bear, alumnus of the class of ’91. What I see is a Cherokee brave, and the warpath is what he has been travelling. Firewater and other things have got him going. His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers are mixed up like a frizzly hen’s. The dust of miles is on his moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear. But in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian’s collar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I thought I’d sit on the porch and wait for the one o’clock train. I wasn’t feeling saturated with mirth. Here was John Tom on one of his sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me. But then, I’m always having trouble with other people’s troubles. Every few minutes <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Conyers would come out on the porch and look down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand. Now, wasn’t that like a woman? And that brings up cats. ‘I saw a mouse go in this hole,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Cat; ‘you can go prize up a plank over there if you like; I’ll watch this hole.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“About a quarter to one o’clock the lady comes out again, restless, crying easy, as females do for their own amusement, and she looks down that road again and listens. ‘Now, ma’am,’ says I, ‘there’s no use watching cold wheel-tracks. By this time they’re halfway to—’ ‘Hush,’ she says, holding up her hand. And I do hear something coming ‘flip-flap’ in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinée. And up the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian. The lamp in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize <abbr>Mr.</abbr> J. T. Little Bear, alumnus of the class of ’91. What I see is a Cherokee brave, and the warpath is what he has been travelling. Firewater and other things have got him going. His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers are mixed up like a frizzly hen’s. The dust of miles is on his moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear. But in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian’s collar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Pappoose!’ says John Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man’s syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear’s claws and copper color. ‘Me bring,’ says he, and he lays the kid in his mother’s arms. ‘Run fifteen mile,’ says John Tom—‘Ugh! Catch white man. Bring pappoose.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The little woman is in extremities of gladness. She must wake up that stir-up trouble youngster and hug him and make proclamation that he is his mamma’s own precious treasure. I was about to ask questions, but I looked at Mr. Little Bear, and my eye caught the sight of something in his belt. ‘Now go to bed, ma’am,’ says I, ‘and this gadabout youngster likewise, for there’s no more danger, and the kidnapping business is not what it was earlier in the night.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“The little woman is in extremities of gladness. She must wake up that stir-up trouble youngster and hug him and make proclamation that he is his mamma’s own precious treasure. I was about to ask questions, but I looked at <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Little Bear, and my eye caught the sight of something in his belt. ‘Now go to bed, ma’am,’ says I, ‘and this gadabout youngster likewise, for there’s no more danger, and the kidnapping business is not what it was earlier in the night.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“I inveigled John Tom down to camp quick, and when he tumbled over asleep I got that thing out of his belt and disposed of it where the eye of education can’t see it. For even the football colleges disapprove of the art of scalp-taking in their curriculums.</p>
|
||||
<p>“It is ten o’clock next day when John Tom wakes up and looks around. I am glad to see the nineteenth century in his eyes again.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What was it, Jeff?’ he asks.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,22 +6,17 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-5" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>HELPING THE OTHER FELLOW</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Originally published in <i>Munsey’s Magazine</i>, December, 1908.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-5" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">HELPING THE OTHER FELLOW</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Originally published in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Munsey’s Magazine</i>, December, 1908.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<div class="center">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">
|
||||
<i>“But can thim that helps others help thimselves!”<span class="ind10">—Mulvaney.</span></i>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>“But can thim that helps others help thimselves!”</p>
|
||||
<cite>—Mulvaney.</cite>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<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>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 <i>Terence</i>.</p>
|
||||
<h3>II</h3>
|
||||
@ -54,7 +49,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Not me,’ says I. ‘Not any demon rum or any of its ramifications for mine. It’s one of my non-weaknesses.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘It’s my failing,’ says he. ‘What’s your particular soft point?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Industry,’ says I, promptly. ‘I’m hard-working, diligent, industrious, and energetic.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘My dear Mr. 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>
|
||||
<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>
|
||||
<h3>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 summer-house 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>
|
||||
@ -64,7 +59,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You Yankees,’ says he, polite, ‘assuredly take the cake for assurance, I assure you’—or words to that effect. He spoke English better than you or me. ‘You’ve had a long walk,’ says he, ‘but it’s nicer in the cool morning to walk than to ride. May I suggest some refreshments?’ says he.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Rum,’ says Wainwright.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Gimme a cigar,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir, the two talked an hour, keeping the generals and equities all in their good uniforms waiting outside the fence. And while I smoked, silent, I listened to Clifford Wainwright making a solid republic out of the wreck of one. I didn’t follow his arguments with any special collocation of international intelligibility; but he had Mr. Gomez’s attention glued and riveted. He takes out a pencil and marks the white linen tablecloth all over with figures and estimates and deductions. He speaks more or less disrespectfully of import and export duties and custom-house receipts and taxes and treaties and budgets and concessions and such truck that politics and government require; and when he gets through the Gomez man hops up and shakes his hand and says he’s saved the country and the people.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Well, sir, the two talked an hour, keeping the generals and equities all in their good uniforms waiting outside the fence. And while I smoked, silent, I listened to Clifford Wainwright making a solid republic out of the wreck of one. I didn’t follow his arguments with any special collocation of international intelligibility; but he had <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Gomez’s attention glued and riveted. He takes out a pencil and marks the white linen tablecloth all over with figures and estimates and deductions. He speaks more or less disrespectfully of import and export duties and custom-house receipts and taxes and treaties and budgets and concessions and such truck that politics and government require; and when he gets through the Gomez man hops up and shakes his hand and says he’s saved the country and the people.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘You shall be rewarded,’ says the president.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Might I suggest another—rum?’ says Wainwright.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Cigar for me—darker brand,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
@ -90,8 +85,8 @@
|
||||
<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 good-bye,” 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>
|
||||
<h3>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 St. 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 St. Charles to a dim <i>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>
|
||||
<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>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>
|
||||
<p>“Can thim that helps others help thimselves?”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
||||
</body>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE MARIONETTES</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Originally published in <i>The Black Cat</i> for April, 1902, The Short Story Publishing Co.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-6" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE MARIONETTES</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Originally published in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Black Cat</i> for April, 1902, The Short Story Publishing <abbr>Co.</abbr></p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>The policeman was standing at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street and a prodigiously dark alley near where the elevated railroad crosses the street. The time was two o’clock in the morning; the outlook a stretch of cold, drizzling, unsociable blackness until the dawn.</p>
|
||||
<p>A man, wearing a long overcoat, with his hat tilted down in front, and carrying something in one hand, walked softly but rapidly out of the black alley. The policeman accosted him civilly, but with the assured air that is linked with conscious authority. The hour, the alley’s musty reputation, the pedestrian’s haste, the burden he carried—these easily combined into the “suspicious circumstances” that required illumination at the officer’s hands.</p>
|
||||
<p>The “suspect” halted readily and tilted back his hat, exposing, in the flicker of the electric lights, an emotionless, smooth countenance with a rather long nose and steady dark eyes. Thrusting his gloved hand into a side pocket of his overcoat, he drew out a card and handed it to the policeman. Holding it to catch the uncertain light, the officer read the name “Charles Spencer James, M. D.” The street and number of the address were of a neighborhood so solid and respectable as to subdue even curiosity. The policeman’s downward glance at the article carried in the doctor’s hand—a handsome medicine case of black leather, with small silver mountings—further endorsed the guarantee of the card.</p>
|
||||
@ -36,7 +36,7 @@
|
||||
<p>There emanated from Doctor James an aura of calm force and reserve strength that was as manna in the desert to the weak and desolate among his patrons. Always had women, especially, been attracted by something in his sick-room manner. It was not the indulgent suavity of the fashionable healer, but a manner of poise, of sureness, of ability to overcome fate, of deference and protection and devotion. There was an exploring magnetism in his steadfast, luminous brown eves; a latent authority in the impassive, even priestly, tranquillity of his smooth countenance that outwardly fitted him for the part of confidant and consoler. Sometimes, at his first professional visit, women would tell him where they hid their diamonds at night from the burglars.</p>
|
||||
<p>With the ease of much practice, Doctor James’s unroving eyes estimated the order and quality of the room’s furnishings. The appointments were rich and costly. The same glance had secured cognizance of the lady’s appearance. She was small and scarcely past twenty. Her face possessed the title to a winsome prettiness, now obscured by (you would say) rather a fixed melancholy than the more violent imprint of a sudden sorrow. Upon her forehead, above one eyebrow, was a livid bruise, suffered, the physician’s eye told him, within the past six hours.</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James’s fingers went to the man’s wrist. His almost vocal eyes questioned the lady.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am Mrs. Chandler,” she responded, speaking with the plaintive Southern slur and intonation. “My husband was taken suddenly ill about ten minutes before you came. He has had attacks of heart trouble before—some of them were very bad.” His clothed state and the late hour seemed to prompt her to further explanation. “He had been out late; to—a supper, I believe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Chandler,” she responded, speaking with the plaintive Southern slur and intonation. “My husband was taken suddenly ill about ten minutes before you came. He has had attacks of heart trouble before—some of them were very bad.” His clothed state and the late hour seemed to prompt her to further explanation. “He had been out late; to—a supper, I believe.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James now turned his attention to his patient. In whichever of his “professions” he happened to be engaged he was wont to honor the “case” or the “job” with his whole interest.</p>
|
||||
<p>The sick man appeared to be about thirty. His countenance bore a look of boldness and dissipation, but was not without a symmetry of feature and the fine lines drawn by a taste and indulgence in humor that gave the redeeming touch. There was an odor of spilled wine about his clothes.</p>
|
||||
<p>The physician laid back his outer garments, and then, with a penknife, slit the shirt-front from collar to waist. The obstacles cleared, he laid his ear to the heart and listened intently.</p>
|
||||
@ -53,7 +53,7 @@
|
||||
<p>“Dar’s mo’ strange t’ings dan dat ’round here,” began the negress, but the physician hushed her in a seldom employed peremptory, concentrated voice with which he had often allayed hysteria itself. He returned to the other room, closing the door softly behind him. The man on the bed had not moved, but his eyes were open. His lips seemed to form words. Doctor James bent his head to listen. “The money! the money!” was what they were whispering.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Can you understand what I say?” asked the doctor, speaking low, but distinctly.</p>
|
||||
<p>The head nodded slightly.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a physician, sent for by your wife. You are Mr. Chandler, I am told. You are quite ill. You must not excite or distress yourself at all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I am a physician, sent for by your wife. You are <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Chandler, I am told. You are quite ill. You must not excite or distress yourself at all.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The patient’s eyes seemed to beckon to him. The doctor stooped to catch the same faint words.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The money—the twenty thousand dollars.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Where is this money?—in the bank?”</p>
|
||||
@ -102,16 +102,16 @@
|
||||
<p>The one retort of Doctor James must have struck home to the other’s remaining shreds of shame and manhood, for it proved the <i>coup de grâce</i>. A deep blush suffused his face—an ignominious <i>rosa mortis</i>; the respiration ceased, and, with scarcely a tremor, Chandler expired.</p>
|
||||
<p>Close following upon his last breath came the negress, bringing the medicine. With a hand gently pressing upon the closed eyelids, Doctor James told her of the end. Not grief, but a hereditary rapprochement with death in the abstract, moved her to a dismal, watery snuffling, accompanied by her usual jeremiad.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Dar now! It’s in de Lawd’s hands. He am de jedge ob de transgressor, and de suppo’t of dem in distress. He gwine hab suppo’t us now. Cindy done paid out de last quarter fer dis bottle of physic, and it nebber come to no use.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do I understand,” asked Doctor James, “that Mrs. Chandler has no money?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Do I understand,” asked Doctor James, “that <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Chandler has no money?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Money, suh? You know what make Miss Amy fall down and so weak? Stahvation, sub. Nothin’ to eat in dis house but some crumbly crackers in three days. Dat angel sell her finger rings and watch mont’s ago. Dis fine house, suh, wid de red cyarpets and shiny bureaus, it’s all hired; and de man talkin’ scan’lous about de rent. Dat debble—‘scuse me, Lawd—he done in Yo’ hands fer jedgment, now—he made way wid everything.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The physician’s silence encouraged her to continue. The history that he gleaned from Cindy’s disordered monologue was an old one, of illusion, wilfulness, disaster, cruelty and pride. Standing out from the blurred panorama of her gabble were little clear pictures—an ideal home in the far South; a quickly repented marriage; an unhappy season, full of wrongs and abuse, and, of late, an inheritance of money that promised deliverance; its seizure and waste by the dog-wolf during a two months’ absence, and his return in the midst of a scandalous carouse. Unobtruded, but visible between every line, ran a pure white thread through the smudged warp of the story—the simple, all-enduring, sublime love of the old negress, following her mistress unswervingly through everything to the end.</p>
|
||||
<p>When at last she paused, the physician spoke, asking if the house contained whiskey or liquor of any sort. There was, the old woman informed him, half a bottle of brandy left in the sideboard by the dog-wolf.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Prepare a toddy as I told you,” said Doctor James. “Wake your mistress; have her drink it, and tell her what has happened.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Some ten minutes afterward, Mrs. Chandler entered, supported by old Cindy’s arm. She appeared to be a little stronger since her sleep and the stimulant she had taken. Doctor James had covered, with a sheet, the form upon the bed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Some ten minutes afterward, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Chandler entered, supported by old Cindy’s arm. She appeared to be a little stronger since her sleep and the stimulant she had taken. Doctor James had covered, with a sheet, the form upon the bed.</p>
|
||||
<p>The lady turned her mournful eyes once, with a half-frightened look, toward it, and pressed closer to her loyal protector. Her eyes were dry and bright. Sorrow seemed to have done its utmost with her. The fount of tears was dried; feeling itself paralyzed.</p>
|
||||
<p>Doctor James was standing near the table, his overcoat donned, his hat and medicine case in his hand. His face was calm and impassive—practice had inured him to the sight of human suffering. His lambent brown eyes alone expressed a discreet professional sympathy.</p>
|
||||
<p>He spoke kindly and briefly, stating that, as the hour was late, and assistance, no doubt, difficult to procure, he would himself send the proper persons to attend to the necessary finalities.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One matter, in conclusion,” said the doctor, pointing to the safe with its still wide-open door. “Your husband, Mrs. Chandler, toward the end, felt that he could not live; and directed me to open that safe, giving me the number upon which the combination is set. In case you may need to use it, you will remember that the number is forty-one. Turn several times to the right; then to the left once; stop at forty-one. He would not permit me to waken you, though he knew the end was near.</p>
|
||||
<p>“One matter, in conclusion,” said the doctor, pointing to the safe with its still wide-open door. “Your husband, <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Chandler, toward the end, felt that he could not live; and directed me to open that safe, giving me the number upon which the combination is set. In case you may need to use it, you will remember that the number is forty-one. Turn several times to the right; then to the left once; stop at forty-one. He would not permit me to waken you, though he knew the end was near.</p>
|
||||
<p>“In that safe he said he had placed a sum of money—not large—but enough to enable you to carry out his last request. That was that you should return to your old home, and, in after days, when time shall have made it easier, forgive his many sins against you.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He pointed to the table, where lay an orderly pile of banknotes, surmounted by two stacks of gold coins.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The money is there—as he described it—eight hundred and thirty dollars. I beg to leave my card with you, in case I can be of any service later on.”</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
|
||||
</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE MARQUIS AND MISS SALLY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Originally published in <i>Everybody’s Magazine</i>, June 1903.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-7" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE MARQUIS AND MISS SALLY</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Originally published in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Everybody’s Magazine</i>, June 1903.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>Without knowing it, Old Bill Bascom had the honor of being overtaken by fate the same day with the Marquis of Borodale.</p>
|
||||
<p>The Marquis lived in Regent Square, London. Old Bill lived on Limping Doe Creek, Hardeman County, Texas. The cataclysm that engulfed the Marquis took the form of a bursting bubble known as the Central and South American Mahogany and Caoutchouc Monopoly. Old Bill’s Nemesis was in the no less perilous shape of a band of civilized Indian cattle thieves from the Territory who ran off his entire herd of four hundred head, and shot old Bill dead as he trailed after them. To even up the consequences of the two catastrophes, the Marquis, as soon as he found that all he possessed would pay only fifteen shillings on the pound of his indebtedness, shot himself.</p>
|
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<p>Old Bill left a family of six motherless sons and daughters, who found themselves without even a red steer left to eat, or a red cent to buy one with.</p>
|
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@ -61,10 +61,10 @@
|
||||
<p>“Go easy, Marquis,” whispered Rube Fellows, one of the boys that held him. “It’s all in fun. Take it good-natured and they’ll let you off light. They’re only goin’ to stretch you over the log and tan you eight or ten times with the leggin’s. ‘Twon’t hurt much.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The Marquis, with an exclamation of anger, his white teeth gleaming, suddenly exhibited a surprising strength. He wrenched with his arms so violently that the four men were swayed and dragged many yards from the log. A cry of anger escaped him, and then Miss Sally, his eyes cleared of the tobacco, saw, and he immediately mixed with the struggling group.</p>
|
||||
<p>But at that moment a loud “Hallo!” rang in their ears, and a buckboard drawn by a team of galloping mustangs spun into the campfire’s circle of light. Every man turned to look, and what they saw drove from their minds all thoughts of carrying out Phonograph Davis’s rather time-worn contribution to the evening’s amusement. Bigger game than the Marquis was at hand, and his captors released him and stood staring at the approaching victim.</p>
|
||||
<p>The buckboard and team belonged to Sam Holly, a cattleman from the Big Muddy. Sam was driving, and with him was a stout, smooth-faced man, wearing a frock coat and a high silk hat. That was the county judge, Mr. Dave Hackett, candidate for reëlection. Sam was escorting him about the county, among the camps, to shake up the sovereign voters.</p>
|
||||
<p>The buckboard and team belonged to Sam Holly, a cattleman from the Big Muddy. Sam was driving, and with him was a stout, smooth-faced man, wearing a frock coat and a high silk hat. That was the county judge, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Dave Hackett, candidate for reëlection. Sam was escorting him about the county, among the camps, to shake up the sovereign voters.</p>
|
||||
<p>The men got out, hitched the team to a mesquite, and walked toward the fire.</p>
|
||||
<p>Instantly every man in camp, except the Marquis, Miss Sally, and Pink Saunders, who had to play host, uttered a frightful yell of assumed terror and fled on all sides into the darkness.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Heavens alive!” exclaimed Hackett, “are we as ugly as that? How do you do, Mr. Saunders? Glad to see you again. What are you doing to my hat, Holly?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Heavens alive!” exclaimed Hackett, “are we as ugly as that? How do you do, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Saunders? Glad to see you again. What are you doing to my hat, Holly?”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I was afraid of this hat,” said Sam Holly, meditatively. He had taken the hat from Hackett’s head and was holding it in his hand, looking dubiously around at the shadows beyond the firelight where now absolute stillness reigned. “What do you think, Saunders?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Pink grinned.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Better elevate it some,” he said, in the tone of one giving disinterested advice. “The light ain’t none too good. I wouldn’t want it on my head.”</p>
|
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|
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@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
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</head>
|
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<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
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<section id="chapter-8" epub:type="chapter">
|
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<h2>A FOG IN SANTONE</h2>
|
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<blockquote>
|
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<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Published in <i>The Cosmopolitan</i> , October, 1912. Probably written in 1904, or shortly after O. Henry’s first successes in New York.]</p>
|
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<section id="chapter-8" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">A FOG IN SANTONE</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Published in <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">The Cosmopolitan</i> , October, 1912. Probably written in 1904, or shortly after O. Henry’s first successes in New York.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>The drug clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the high-turned overcoat collar.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I would rather not supply you,” he said doubtfully. “I sold you a dozen morphine tablets less than an hour ago.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The customer smiles wanly. “The fault is in your crooked streets. I didn’t intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up. Excuse me.”</p>
|
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@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
<p>The words of it they do not understand—neither Toledo nor Memphis, but words are the least important things in life. The music tears the breasts of the seekers after Nepenthe, inciting Toledo to remark:</p>
|
||||
<p>“Those kids of mine—I wonder—by God, Mr. Goodall of Memphis, we had too little of that whiskey! No slow music in mine, if you please. It makes you disremember to forget.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Those kids of mine—I wonder—by God, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Goodall of Memphis, we had too little of that whiskey! No slow music in mine, if you please. It makes you disremember to forget.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Hurd of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says: “I’m a son of a gun! Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San Pedro Springs at eleven. Forgot it. A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at Rhinegelder’s Garden. That Noo York chap’s a lucky dog—got one whole lung—good for a year yet. Plenty of money, too. He pays for everything. I can’t afford—to miss the jamboree. Sorry you ain’t going along. Good-by, Goodall of Memphis.”</p>
|
||||
<p>He rounds the corner and shuffles away, casting off thus easily the ties of acquaintanceship as the moribund do, the season of dissolution being man’s supreme hour of egoism and selfishness. But he turns and calls back through the fog to the other: “I say, Goodall of Memphis! If you get there before I do, tell ’em Hurd’s a-comin’ too. Hurd, of T’leder, Ah-hia.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Thus Goodall’s tempter deserts him. That youth, uncomplaining and uncaring, takes a spell at coughing, and, recovered, wanders desultorily on down the street, the name of which he neither knows nor recks. At a certain point he perceives swinging doors, and hears, filtering between them a noise of wind and string instruments. Two men enter from the street as he arrives, and he follows them in. There is a kind of ante-chamber, plentifully set with palms and cactuses and oleanders. At little marble-topped tables some people sit, while soft-shod attendants bring the beer. All is orderly, clean, melancholy, gay, of the German method of pleasure. At his right is the foot of a stairway. A man there holds out his hand. Goodall extends his, full of silver, the man selects therefrom a coin. Goodall goes upstairs and sees there two galleries extending along the sides of a concert hall which he now perceives to lie below and beyond the anteroom he first entered. These galleries are divided into boxes or stalls, which bestow with the aid of hanging lace curtains, a certain privacy upon their occupants.</p>
|
||||
@ -59,11 +59,11 @@
|
||||
<p>Goodall fillips a little pasteboard box upon the table. “I put ’em all together in there.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Rosa, being a woman, must raise the lid, and gave a slight shiver at the innocent looking triturates. “Horrid things! but those little, white bits—they could never kill one!”</p>
|
||||
<p>Indeed they could. Walter knew better. Nine grains of morphia! Why, half the amount might.</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Rosa demands to know about Mr. Hurd, of Toledo, and is told. She laughs like a delighted child. “What a funny fellow! But tell me more about your home and your sisters, Walter. I know enough about Texas and tarantulas and cowboys.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Miss Rosa demands to know about <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Hurd, of Toledo, and is told. She laughs like a delighted child. “What a funny fellow! But tell me more about your home and your sisters, Walter. I know enough about Texas and tarantulas and cowboys.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The theme is dear, just now, to his mood, and he lays before her the simple details of a true home; the little ties and endearments that so fill the exile’s heart. Of his sisters, one, Alice, furnishes him a theme he loves to dwell upon.</p>
|
||||
<p>“She is like you, Miss Rosa,” he says. “Maybe not quite so pretty, but, just as nice, and good, and—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“There! Walter,” says Miss Rosa sharply, “now talk about something else.”</p>
|
||||
<p>But a shadow falls upon the wall outside, preceding a big, softly treading man, finely dressed, who pauses a second before the curtains and then passes on. Presently comes the waiter with a message: “Mr. Rolfe says—”</p>
|
||||
<p>But a shadow falls upon the wall outside, preceding a big, softly treading man, finely dressed, who pauses a second before the curtains and then passes on. Presently comes the waiter with a message: “<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Rolfe says—”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Tell Rolfe I’m engaged.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“I don’t know why it is,” says Goodall, of Memphis, “but I don’t feel as bad as I did. An hour ago I wanted to die, but since I’ve met you, Miss Rosa, I’d like so much to live.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The young woman whirls around the table, lays an arm behind his neck and kisses him on the cheek.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
@ -6,13 +6,13 @@
|
||||
<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
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</head>
|
||||
<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
|
||||
<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="chapter">
|
||||
<h2>THE FRIENDLY CALL</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote>
|
||||
<blockquote class="small">
|
||||
<p class="noindent">[Published in “Monthly Magazine Section,” July, 1910.]</p>
|
||||
<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
|
||||
<header>
|
||||
<h2 epub:type="title">THE FRIENDLY CALL</h2>
|
||||
<blockquote epub:type="epigraph">
|
||||
<p>Published in “Monthly Magazine Section,” July, 1910.</p>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</blockquote>
|
||||
</header>
|
||||
<p>When I used to sell hardware in the West, I often “made” a little town called Saltillo, in Colorado. I was always certain of securing a small or a large order from Simon Bell, who kept a general store there. Bell was one of those six-foot, low-voiced products, formed from a union of the West and the South. I liked him. To look at him you would think he should be robbing stage coaches or juggling gold mines with both hands; but he would sell you a paper of tacks or a spool of thread, with ten times more patience and courtesy than any saleslady in a city department store.</p>
|
||||
<p>I had a twofold object in my last visit to Saltillo. One was to sell a bill of goods; the other to advise Bell of a chance that I knew of by which I was certain he could make a small fortune.</p>
|
||||
<p>In Mountain City, a town on the Union Pacific, five times larger than Saltillo, a mercantile firm was about to go to the wall. It had a lively and growing custom, but was on the edge of dissolution and ruin. Mismanagement and the gambling habits of one of the partners explained it. The condition of the firm was not yet public property. I had my knowledge of it from a private source. I knew that, if the ready cash were offered, the stock and good will could be bought for about one fourth their value.</p>
|
||||
@ -47,7 +47,7 @@
|
||||
<p>Bell lived in a comfortable, plain, square, two-story white house on the edge of the little town. I waited in the parlor—a room depressingly genteel—furnished with red plush, straw matting, looped-up lace curtains, and a glass case large enough to contain a mummy, full of mineral specimens.</p>
|
||||
<p>While I waited, I heard, upstairs, that unmistakable sound instantly recognized the world over—a bickering woman’s voice, rising as her anger and fury grew. I could hear, between the gusts, the temperate rumble of Bell’s tones, striving to oil the troubled waters.</p>
|
||||
<p>The storm subsided soon; but not before I had heard the woman say, in a lower, concentrated tone, rather more carrying than her high-pitched railings: “This is the last time. I tell you—the last time. Oh, you <i>will</i> understand.”</p>
|
||||
<p>The household seemed to consist of only Bell and his wife and a servant or two. I was introduced to Mrs. Bell at supper.</p>
|
||||
<p>The household seemed to consist of only Bell and his wife and a servant or two. I was introduced to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bell at supper.</p>
|
||||
<p>At first sight she seemed to be a handsome woman, but I soon perceived that her charm had been spoiled. An uncontrolled petulance, I thought, and emotional egotism, an absence of poise and a habitual dissatisfaction had marred her womanhood. During the meal, she showed that false gayety, spurious kindliness and reactionary softness that mark the woman addicted to tantrums. Withal, she was a woman who might be attractive to many men.</p>
|
||||
<p>After supper, Bell and I took our chairs outside, set them on the grass in the moonlight and smoked. The full moon is a witch. In her light, truthful men dig up for you nuggets of purer gold; while liars squeeze out brighter colors from the tubes of their invention. I saw Bell’s broad, slow smile come out upon his face and linger there.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I reckon you think George and me are a funny kind of friends,” he said. “The fact is we never did take much interest in each other’s company. But his idea and mine, of what a friend should be, was always synonymous and we lived up to it, strict, all these years. Now, I’ll give you an idea of what our idea is.</p>
|
||||
@ -74,22 +74,22 @@
|
||||
<p>“ ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asks George.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I want you to head her off. I want you to cut me out. I want you to come to the rescue. Suppose you seen a wildcat about for to eat me, what would you do?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Go for it,’ says I.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Correct,’ says George. ‘Then go for this Mrs. De Clinton the same.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Correct,’ says George. ‘Then go for this <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> De Clinton the same.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘How am I to do it?’ I asks. ‘By force and awfulness or in some gentler and less lurid manner?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Court her,’ George says, ‘get her off my trail. Feed her. Take her out in boats. Hang around her and stick to her. Get her mashed on you if you can. Some women are pretty big fools. Who knows but what she might take a fancy to you.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Had you ever thought,’ I asks, ‘of repressing your fatal fascinations in her presence; of squeezing a harsh note in the melody of your siren voice, of veiling your beauty—in other words, of giving her the bounce yourself?’</p>
|
||||
<p>“George sees no essence of sarcasm in my remark. He twists his moustache and looks at the points of his shoes.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, Simms,’ he said, ‘you know how I am about the ladies. I can’t hurt none of their feelings. I’m, by nature, polite and esteemful of their intents and purposes. This Mrs. De Clinton don’t appear to be the suitable sort for me. Besides, I ain’t a marrying man by all means.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘Well, Simms,’ he said, ‘you know how I am about the ladies. I can’t hurt none of their feelings. I’m, by nature, polite and esteemful of their intents and purposes. This <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> De Clinton don’t appear to be the suitable sort for me. Besides, I ain’t a marrying man by all means.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘All right,’ said I, ‘I’ll do the best I can in the case.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“So I bought a new outfit of clothes and a book on etiquette and made a dead set for Mrs. De Clinton. She was a fine-looking woman, cheerful and gay. At first, I almost had to hobble her to keep her from loping around at George’s heels; but finally I got her so she seemed glad to go riding with me and sailing on the lake; and she seemed real hurt on the mornings when I forgot to send her a bunch of flowers. Still, I didn’t like the way she looked at George, sometimes, out of the corner of her eye. George was having a fine time now, going with the whole bunch just as he pleased. Yes’m,” continued Bell, “she certainly was a fine-looking woman at that time. She’s changed some since, as you might have noticed at the supper table.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“So I bought a new outfit of clothes and a book on etiquette and made a dead set for <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> De Clinton. She was a fine-looking woman, cheerful and gay. At first, I almost had to hobble her to keep her from loping around at George’s heels; but finally I got her so she seemed glad to go riding with me and sailing on the lake; and she seemed real hurt on the mornings when I forgot to send her a bunch of flowers. Still, I didn’t like the way she looked at George, sometimes, out of the corner of her eye. George was having a fine time now, going with the whole bunch just as he pleased. Yes’m,” continued Bell, “she certainly was a fine-looking woman at that time. She’s changed some since, as you might have noticed at the supper table.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“What!” I exclaimed.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I married Mrs. De Clinton,” went on Bell. “One evening while we were up at the lake. When I told George about it, he opened his mouth and I thought he was going to break our traditions and say something grateful, but he swallowed it back.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I married <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> De Clinton,” went on Bell. “One evening while we were up at the lake. When I told George about it, he opened his mouth and I thought he was going to break our traditions and say something grateful, but he swallowed it back.</p>
|
||||
<p>“ ‘All right,’ says he, playing with his dog. ‘I hope you won’t have too much trouble. Myself, I’m not never going to marry.’</p>
|
||||
<p>“That was three years ago,” said Bell. “We came here to live. For a year we got along medium fine. And then everything changed. For two years I’ve been having something that rhymes first-class with my name. You heard the row upstairs this evening? That was a merry welcome compared to the usual average. She’s tired of me and of this little town life and she rages all day, like a panther in a cage. I stood it until two weeks ago and then I had to send out The Call. I located George in Sacramento. He started the day he got my wire.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Mrs. Bell came out of the house swiftly toward us. Some strong excitement or anxiety seemed to possess her, but she smiled a faint hostess smile, and tried to keep her voice calm.</p>
|
||||
<p><abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bell came out of the house swiftly toward us. Some strong excitement or anxiety seemed to possess her, but she smiled a faint hostess smile, and tried to keep her voice calm.</p>
|
||||
<p>“The dew is falling,” she said, “and it’s growing rather late. Wouldn’t you gentlemen rather come into the house?”</p>
|
||||
<p>Bell took some cigars from his pocket and answered: “It’s most too fine a night to turn in yet. I think Mr. Ames and I will walk out along the road a mile or so and have another smoke. I want to talk with him about some goods that I want to buy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Up the road or down the road?” asked Mrs. Bell.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bell took some cigars from his pocket and answered: “It’s most too fine a night to turn in yet. I think <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ames and I will walk out along the road a mile or so and have another smoke. I want to talk with him about some goods that I want to buy.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Up the road or down the road?” asked <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bell.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Down,” said Bell.</p>
|
||||
<p>I thought she breathed a sigh of relief.</p>
|
||||
<p>When we had gone a hundred yards and the house became concealed by trees, Bell guided me into the thick grove that lined the road and back through them toward the house again. We stopped within twenty yards of the house, concealed by the dark shadows. I wondered at this maneuver. And then I heard in the distance coming down the road beyond the house, the regular hoofbeats of a team of horses. Bell held his watch in a ray of moonlight.</p>
|
||||
@ -100,11 +100,11 @@
|
||||
<p>I began to wonder what friendship was, after all.</p>
|
||||
<p>When we went into the house, Bell began to talk easily on other subjects; and I took his cue. By and by the big chance to buy out the business in Mountain City came back to my mind and I began to urge it upon him. Now that he was free, it would be easier for him to make the move; and he was sure of a splendid bargain.</p>
|
||||
<p>Bell was silent for some minutes, but when I looked at him I fancied that he was thinking of something else—that he was not considering the project.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no, Mr. Ames,” he said, after a while, “I can’t make that deal. I’m awful thankful to you, though, for telling me about it. But I’ve got to stay here. I can’t go to Mountain City.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why, no, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ames,” he said, after a while, “I can’t make that deal. I’m awful thankful to you, though, for telling me about it. But I’ve got to stay here. I can’t go to Mountain City.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Why?” I asked.</p>
|
||||
<p>“Missis Bell,” he replied, “won’t live in Mountain City, She hates the place and wouldn’t go there. I’ve got to keep right on here in Saltillo.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“Mrs. Bell!” I exclaimed, too puzzled to conjecture what he meant.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I ought to explain,” said Bell. “I know George and I know Mrs. Bell. He’s impatient in his ways. He can’t stand things that fret him, long, like I can. Six months, I give them—six months of married life, and there’ll be another disunion. Mrs. Bell will come back to me. There’s no other place for her to go. I’ve got to stay here and wait. At the end of six months, I’ll have to grab a satchel and catch the first train. For George will be sending out The Call.”</p>
|
||||
<p>“<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bell!” I exclaimed, too puzzled to conjecture what he meant.</p>
|
||||
<p>“I ought to explain,” said Bell. “I know George and I know <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bell. He’s impatient in his ways. He can’t stand things that fret him, long, like I can. Six months, I give them—six months of married life, and there’ll be another disunion. <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Bell will come back to me. There’s no other place for her to go. I’ve got to stay here and wait. At the end of six months, I’ll have to grab a satchel and catch the first train. For George will be sending out The Call.”</p>
|
||||
</section>
|
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</body>
|
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|
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