O. HENRY MEMORIAL
AWARD
PRIZE STORIES
of 1923
PRELUDE
By EDGAR VALENTINE SMITH
From Harper’s
WHEN she was fifteen years old Selina Jo was doing a man’s work in Pruitt’s turpentine orchard; properly, though, her story begins earlier than this.
It was shortly before his daughter was born that Shug Hudsill brought his young wife, Marthy, to a sandy land homestead—twenty-five miles from the nearest railroad—in that section of the country which borders the Gulf of Mexico. There followed shortly the inevitable log-rolling, at which the neighbours—mostly Hudsills themselves—contributed their labour. Shug furnished refreshments in the form of “shinny,” an unpalatable, but unusually potent, native rum. Otherwise, his part in the erection of his future home was largely advisory. Despite this, though, the house, a two-room cabin of the “saddle-bag” type, was soon erected. Hand-split pine boards covered the roof and gave fair promise of keeping out the rain. An unglazed window and a door in each room, which would be closed with rough wooden shutters during inclement weather, served for ventilation and lighting. A stick-and-clay chimney at one end of the cabin gave outlet to the single fireplace which was to answer the dual purpose of cooking and heating.
By devious methods Shug accumulated two or three runty, tick-infested cows and a few razorback hogs. These were left, in the main, to shift for themselves. There were tough native grasses available and the canebrakes in Shoalwater River were close by. During severe weather such of the cows as chanced to be giving a few pints of thin, watery milk daily were fed a little home-grown fodder and corn on the ear. With proboscides inordinately sharpened for the purpose, the hogs probed for succulent roots in the rank undergrowth of the nearby swamp. When hog-killing season arrived Shug would shoulder his gun and slouch away for his winter’s supply of meat. Neighbours charged it against him that he was not always careful to see to it that they were his own shotes which he killed. Since it was a simple matter, though, to snip off the telltale ear markings of a dead pig, his pilferings, if a fact, were never proved.