Short Fiction - O. Henry (books recommended by bts .TXT) 📗

Christmas Eve, to give a synopsis of preceding chapters. I will fine-toothcomb the town for an idea next summer, quoth I. And so I walked, rode and taxi-cabbed. I spoke to waiters, subway guards, chauffeurs and newsboys and tried to draw from them some bit of life, some experience that might make a story, a Christmas story, C.O.D., at twenty cents a word. But there was not a syllable in the silly bunch, not a comma in the comatose lot.

And then I wandered into Grand Street and I saw that which made me instinctively clutch my fountain pen. A man, unswept, unmoneyed and unstrung, was about to hurl a brick into a pawnbroker’s window. His arm was raised and he was as deliberate as Mr. Tri-Digital Brown of Chicago trying to lessen the average of Mr. John P. Hanswagner of Pittsburgh. (I always spell Pittsburgh with the final “h”; it’s a final h of a town.)

“Here, Bill,” I aid, “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, yes, you would,” he responded.

Which was my chance. “Let us withdraw to yonder inn,” I said, like a head chorus-man whose object is to “get ’em off,” “and we can discuss things.”

“What’s the game?” I asked, after the waiter had received instructions.

“I wanted to get money enough to buy my wife a Christmas present. Been out o’ work for a year. I’m desperate. I⁠—”

“Nothing of the kind,” I contradicted. “People don’t try to steal diamonds on a crowded street for any such purpose. I’m not a detective, as you might know by my guessing so correctly.”

“Well,” he laughed, pulling out a bill and giving it to the waiter for the check; “it’s a good joke and I’ll let you in, though you can’t appreciate it. I thought if I hurled that brick in I’d get arrested quick and be sent to a cell or over on the island or something like that. You see, I’m a magazine writer and I wanted to get a real story⁠—‘Yuletide on the Island’ or something. What’s your line, spoiler of a good story?”

“I?” I said. “My name is John Horner, and I’m a plumber.”

A Technical Error

I never cared especially for feuds, believing them to be even more overrated products of our country than grapefruit, scrapple, or honeymoons. Nevertheless, if I may be allowed, I will tell you of an Indian Territory feud of which I was press-agent, camp-follower, and inaccessory during the fact.

I was on a visit to Sam Durkee’s ranch, where I had a great time falling off unmanicured ponies and waving my bare hand at the lower jaws of wolves about two miles away. Sam was a hardened person of about twenty-five, with a reputation for going home in the dark with perfect equanimity, though often with reluctance.

Over in the Creek Nation was a family bearing the name of Tatum. I was told that the Durkees and Tatums had been feuding for years. Several of each family had bitten the grass, and it was expected that more Nebuchadnezzars would follow. A younger generation of each family was growing up, and the grass was keeping pace with them. But I gathered that they had fought fairly; that they had not lain in cornfields and aimed at the division of their enemies’ suspenders in the back⁠—partly, perhaps, because there were no cornfields, and nobody wore more than one suspender. Nor had any woman or child of either house ever been harmed. In those days⁠—and you will find it so yet⁠—their women were safe.

Sam Durkee had a girl. (If it were an all-fiction magazine that I expect to sell this story to, I should say, “Mr. Durkee rejoiced in a fiancée.”) Her name was Ella Baynes. They appeared to be devoted to each other, and to have perfect confidence in each other, as all couples do who are and have or aren’t and haven’t. She was tolerably pretty, with a heavy mass of brown hair that helped her along. He introduced me to her, which seemed not to lessen her preference for him; so I reasoned that they were surely soul-mates.

Miss Baynes lived in Kingfisher, twenty miles from the ranch. Sam lived on a gallop between the two places.

One day there came to Kingfisher a courageous young man, rather small, with smooth face and regular features. He made many inquiries about the business of the town, and especially of the inhabitants cognominally. He said he was from Muscogee, and he looked it, with his yellow shoes and crocheted four-in-hand. I met him once when I rode in for the mail. He said his name was Beverly Travers, which seemed rather improbable.

There were active times on the ranch, just then, and Sam was too busy to go to town often. As an incompetent and generally worthless guest, it devolved upon me to ride in for little things such as post cards, barrels of flour, baking-powder, smoking-tobacco, and⁠—letters from Ella.

One day, when I was messenger for half a gross of cigarette papers and a couple of wagon tires, I saw the alleged Beverly Travers in a yellow-wheeled buggy with Ella Baynes, driving about town as ostentatiously as the black, waxy mud would permit. I knew that this information would bring no balm of Gilead to Sam’s soul, so I refrained from including it in the news of the city that I retailed on my return. But on the next afternoon an elongated ex-cowboy of the name of Simmons, an old-time pal of Sam’s, who kept a feed store in Kingfisher, rode out to the ranch and rolled and burned many cigarettes before he would talk. When he did make oration, his words were these:

“Say, Sam, there’s been a description of a galoot miscallin’ himself Bevel-edged Travels impairing the atmospheric air of Kingfisher for the past two weeks. You know who he was? He was not otherwise than Ben Tatum, from the Creek Nation, son of old Gopher Tatum that your Uncle Newt shot last February. You know what he done this