O. Henry Encore
STORIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY O. HENRY ❧ Usually Under the Name The Post Man ❧ Discovered and Edited by Mary Sunlocks Harrell
New York1939
Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.
Printed at the Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y., U.S.A.
CL
Copyright, 1939
By Mary Sunlocks Harrell
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Preface
During the years 1934 and 1935 I made a close study of O. Henry’s Texas contacts. The newspapers of Texas during the time of O. Henry’s residence in the state furnished one of the sources which I investigated; and it was during my research in the files of the Houston Post, 1895–1896, that I discovered the stories and illustrations which make up this book. In reprinting this material, I have followed the original version meticulously except for the correction of obvious typographical errors and certain slight aberrations in punctuation that seemed to demand revision for the sake of consistency or to comply with modern standards of usage. Even so, I have allowed many typographical and even grammatical conventions to remain as they were printed forty years ago.
The companion volume to O. Henry Encore, namely, O. Henry in Texas, embodies the results of my investigation into the Texas period of O. Henry’s life, and contains a much more complete account of his work on the Houston Post than I have been able to give in the short introduction to the present volume.
Permission for reprinting the material here was arranged for me by former Governor W. P. Hobby of Texas, now President of the Houston Post, and Mr. A. E. Clarkson, Business Manager of the Post. I am happy to express my gratitude to them. My thanks are due also to Dr. Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr., of The University of Texas, Dr. Vernon Loggins, of Columbia University, and the late Dr. Dorothy Scarborough, of Columbia University, for helping in the identification of the material.
Mary Sunlocks Harrell
Introduction
O. Henry’s real name was William Sidney (Sydney) Porter. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1862, of mixed Quaker (Connecticut) and Southern (Virginia) ancestry. His mother, a woman of remarkable strength of character and some literary talent, died in 1865, and O. Henry’s rearing was entrusted to his paternal grandmother. His father was a physician, but apparently a business failure at everything he attempted. What schooling O. Henry had was received in the little private school of an aunt, Miss Lina Porter. From early boyhood he worked in the drug store of an uncle, and long before he was twenty he was a registered pharmacist.
In 1882 O. Henry left for Texas to seek a dryer climate. It was feared that he was developing consumption. He settled on the Hall ranch in La Salle County, almost half way between San Antonio and the Mexican border. He spent two years on the ranch and in 1884 went to Austin. During his first three years there, he lived as practically an adopted son in the home of Mr. Joe Harrell, who was also a native of Greensboro. He worked at various “jobs”—cigar-store clerk, pharmacist, etc.
In 1887 O. Henry secured a position in the State Land Office as assistant compiling draftsman. Here he remained for four years—the happiest ones, it seems, in his life. The position meant to him prosperity; and five months after he had begun his work, he was married to Miss Athol Estes, the daughter of Mrs. G. P. Roach. There was a romantic elopement, a family reconciliation, and what O. Henry called “a settling down to a comedy of happiness ever afterwards.”
It was shortly after he took up his work in the Land Office that O. Henry first marketed his writings. The amount received for a “string of jokes and sketches” accepted by the Detroit Free Press was small, but it was to increase steadily, even during the most troublous period of his life. As a boy in Greensboro he was known for his drawings and cartoons, and while on the ranch in Texas he drew some pictures and also wrote to his relatives and friends in North Carolina letters indicative of his later literary style.
A change in the State administration in 1891 meant that O. Henry’s position in the Land Office was lost. He became connected with the First National Bank of Austin as paying and receiving teller, where he was to work until December, 1894. Before giving up his position in the bank, he had undertaken the publication of a humorous, semi-political weekly, The Rolling Stone, published at Austin and later simultaneously in Austin and San Antonio. After he left the bank, he had to depend on The Rolling Stone for all his income, but without capital he could not make of it a financial success. It existed only a year, from April 28, 1894, to April 27, 1895. Almost six months passed before O. Henry left Austin to become a staff contributor to the Houston Daily Post. His first work appeared in the Post on October 19, 1895.
It was shortly after this date that an ominous shadow settled over O. Henry’s head. In February of 1896 the Federal Grand Jury at Austin brought an indictment against W. S. Porter, charging the embezzlement of funds while he was acting as paying and receiving teller of the First National Bank of Austin. Finally, summoned to trial in July, 1896, O. Henry left Houston to answer the charge; but he only got as far as Hempstead. There it was necessary to change trains; but instead of taking the train for Austin, he returned to Houston and then went on to New Orleans. When next heard from, he was in Honduras. In January, 1897, after six month’s absence O. Henry received news of the serious illness of his wife. He set out to join her immediately and reached Austin by February 5, 1897. He at once reported to the civil authorities. His bondsmen had not been assessed, and he was allowed to go free but with his bond doubled.
His wife died of tuberculosis the following July, and in February, 1898, O. Henry’ case came to trial. He plead not guilty, but for some unknown reason he maintained an utter indifference throughout the trial. On March 25 he was sentenced to imprisonment in the Federal Ward of the Ohio State Penitentiary. On account of good behavior, however, O. Henry’s term in prison was shortened to a little over three years. On July 24, 1901, he again became a free man. His ability as a pharmacist gave him the opportunity to work in prison at something comparatively easy. But what is of most interest to us in regard to his life there is that by the time he got out of confinement he was pretty well known, under the pseudonym of O. Henry by editors of a number of America’s most popular magazines.
As soon as he was out of prison O. Henry went to join his daughter and the Roaches, who were then living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He now devoted all his energies to writing, and in the spring of 1902 he was called to New York. The eight years that O. Henry spent in the great metropolis were marked by an astonishing fecundity in literary production and an ever increasing fame as the writer of a peculiar type of short story, now known universally as the “O. Henry short story.”
O. Henry died in New York City on June 5, 1910, and was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. The only other event of his life which should be recorded here is his marriage in 1907 to Miss Sara Coleman, a sweetheart of his North Carolina days, and author of Wind of Destiny in which appear many letters written to her by O. Henry just before their marriage.
Practically the whole body of O. Henry’s stories and sketches first appeared in periodicals. Doubleday, Page & Company (now Doubleday, Doran and Company) have put into book form almost everything he wrote, and the volumes in the order of their publication are as follows: Cabbages and Kings, 1904; The Four Million, 1906; The Trimmed Lamp and Heart of the West, 1907; The Voice of the City and The Gentle Grafter, 1908; Roads of Destiny and Options, 1909; Strictly Business and Whirligigs, 1910; Sixes and Sevens, 1911; Rolling Stones, 1913; Waifs and Strays, 1917. In 1923 Harper and Brothers brought out Postscripts by O. Henry, edited by Florence Stratton.
The title of Rolling Stones, invented by Harry Peyton Steger, is based on the weekly, The Rolling Stone, published by O. Henry in Texas in 1894 and 1895. It contains odds and ends; some stories written when O. Henry was at his best, “The Fog in Santone,” for example; material used in the original The Rolling Stone; excerpts from the Postscripts column written for the Houston Post; and a few letters. Postscripts by O. Henry, as the name suggests, contains material taken from Will Porter’s Houston Post column. The Four Million is based on New York life, and The Trimmed Lamp, The Voice of the City, and Strictly Business are simply “more stories of the four million.” Heart of the West is made up exclusively of western stories. Cabbages and Kings, a composite of several individual stories separately published and now woven together, depicts life as O. Henry saw it in Honduras, Central America. The Gentle Grafter is supposedly based upon stories which O. Henry heard his fellow prisoners relate in the Ohio Penitentiary. The other volumes are made up of stories varied in character—New York, Texas, and tropical America.
Just as every other great artist has done, O. Henry has set an example. He invented a short-story technique of his own, and the most discriminating critics have studied that technique and pronounced it good. He owed no more to the “unity of impression idea” of Poe than to the stringy structure of the medieval Patient Griselda. Almost by chance, it seems, he hit upon the trick of concentration of attention, economy of words, rising suspense, and dénouement of climax and surprise; and in that trick lies his art.
There was in O. Henry, however, a power greater than his art. That was his genius for observation. Art without ideas profits nothing. O. Henry got his ideas by seeing everything about him, by always keeping on the qui vive, as he himself said, for “the man around the corner.” Fate dealt him a life of manifold experiences, and from every experience his store of observations increased. After all, his works are no more than an artistic record of life as he saw it.
The stories that make up the present volume have for forty years remained unnoticed in the files of the Houston Post. The general belief that O. Henry was simply a columnist on the Post is probably the reason for their being overlooked. The idea that his column appeared regularly has, furthermore, tended to dismiss the question of what sort of work he really did on the paper. When I examined the files of the Post, I was surprised to find that the column “Some Postscripts” was often missing. In February, 1896, it came out only four times, in April seven, in June three. In spite of this irregularity Will Porter’s salary had gradually been raised from $15 to $25 a week.
Here is a situation which has only one logical explanation. O. Henry must have done other work in order to draw this steadily increasing weekly salary. A close examination of the Houston Post files from October 19, 1895, to June 22, 1896, reveals a mass of material, heretofore unidentified, as unmistakably the work of Will Porter.
What first attracts the eye is the abundance of unsigned comic drawings and clever cartoons. The style of these drawings is unquestionably O. Henry’s. We know from various sources that he was constantly drawing pictures, and we have a positive statement from Colonel R. M. Johnston, under whom Will Porter worked on the Houston Post, that his ability to draw cartoons was called into requisition soon after he joined the staff of the Post. Some of the best of these cartoons depict the political situation of the time. Others are entirely independent of politics and point to the development of the present-day comic strips in all newspapers. Sometimes they portray character traits and are accompanied by rhymed quips. At other times they are used to illustrate lengthy stories. These stories, of course, were composed by Will Porter, and from them the selections for this volume have been made.
The word-usage, sentence-structure, mythological allusion, plot-manipulation, character types, and central ideas that characterize O. Henry’s short stories generally, are also plainly recognizable in these selections from the Houston Post. For example, “A Tragedy” not only turns on a pun, as O. Henry’s stories often do, but is based upon the story of The Arabian Nights, which later colored O. Henry’s whole conception of New York City, Little-Old-Bagdad-on-the-Subway. The central idea of “An Odd Character,” the story of a tramp who claims to be 241 years old, appeared later in “The Enchanted Kiss” and “Door of Unrest.”
The characters of these earlier stories—shop-girls, Irish policemen, crooks, tramps, sheep-men, cowmen, drunkards, pharmacists, doctors, newspaper reporters, dudes—are practically identical with many of those used in later O. Henry stories.
Likewise, O. Henry’s propensity for the use of the “envelope structure,” the sort provided by the pilgrimage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and “narrated development,” or the telling of the story by one of the characters, is very much in evidence in these Houston Post stories, as in a number of his later acknowledged works. For example, in “The Mirage on the Frio” a sheep-man from La Salle County tells his story to a group of men on a Buffalo Bayou fishing party; and later in Cabbages and Kings the story of “The Shamrock and the Palm” is told by the Irishman Clancy to a group of fellow Caucasians who have met at the end of a tropical day.
A large amount of internal evidence, moreover, points emphatically to O. Henry as the author of these pieces. They have the unmistakable stylistic qualities, the humorous point of view, the unexpected climaxes of O. Henry, After a careful and detailed study of every single piece of the material here reproduced, along with the application of various stylistic tests, I was thoroughly convinced of the authenticity of its authorship. In order to support my own convictions, however, I consulted experts who have been students of O. Henry for years. Dr. L. W. Payne, Jr., of The University of Texas, Dr. Vernon Loggins, of Columbia University, and Dr. Dorothy Scarborough, also of Columbia and compiler of many books of short stories, examined photostatic copies which I had made of the material. They are unanimous in the opinion that the authorship of both the drawings with their legends and the articles and stories may be safely attributed to O. Henry’s pen.
The nature of the material included in this volume determined the arrangement of the book into three parts. The stories in the first part show that Will Porter had already discovered the technique that made him famous as O. Henry. The sketches in the second part show O. Henry at work-gathering story material from his observations of life. Will Porter’s ventures into the realm of newspaper poetry, I have included in order to illustrate the principles set forth in his article “Newspaper Poets,” also reprinted here. As far as I know, this article is the only bit of serious literary criticism ever written by O. Henry. It is noteworthy also as the only article in the Houston Post which was ever signed in full by “W. S. Porter.” A more detailed treatment of this and allied topics concerning O. Henry’s life in Texas may be found in my O. Henry in Texas, designed as a companion volume to the present book.
Part One
Stories
A Night Errant
One of the greatest of books is the daily life around us. All that the human mind can conceive; all that the human heart can feel, and the lips tell are encompassed in the little world about us. He that beholds with understanding eyes can see beneath the thin veil of the commonplace, the romance, the tragedy and the broad comedy that is being played upon the world’s stage by the actors great and little who tread the boards of the Theater of the Universe.
Life is neither tragedy nor comedy. It is a mingling of both. High above us omnipotent hands pull the strings that choke our laughter with sobs and cause strange sounds of mirth to break in upon our deepest grief. We are marionettes that dance and cry, scarce at our own wills; and at the end, the flaring lights are out, we are laid to rest in our wooden boxes, and down comes the dark night to cover the scene of our brief triumph.
We elbow heroes on the streets as grand as any the poets have sung; in the faces of obscure women and prosy men a student of his kind can see the imprints of all the passions, both good and bad, that have illuminated the pages of song and story.
There is good in all, and we are none all good. The scholar in his library, the woodcutter in the forest, my lady in her boudoir and the painted, hard-eyed denizen of the byways—we are all from the same clay.
And the hands of fate pull the strings, and we caper and pirouette; and some go up and some go down and haphazard chance or else an obscure divinity pulls us this way and that, and where are we left? Blind and chattering on the brink of an eternal unknowableness. We spring from a common root. The king and the bricklayer are equal except as to environs; the queen and the milkmaid may sit side by side with pail and crown on the ragged edge of destiny; the human heart is the same the world over; and when the judge sits upon the doings of his puppets, who will prevail?
The Post Man has an overcoat with a high collar. This is convenient in more ways than one. He turns it up when passing beggars upon the street corners, and thus shuts out their importunities and saves his conscience; he pulls it around his ears with dignified stateliness when meeting gentlemen who deal in goods which he hath bought anon; and lastly, it is useful when the weather is cold.
Sometimes when the purple shades begin to fall on Saturday evening and the cool mists creep up from the sluggish waters of the bayou the Post Man dons his useful article of apparel and hieth him forth among the hedges and the highways. He sees the seamy side through the gilding that covers the elect of the earth, and he sees the pure gold that glitters amid the mire where tread the lowly and meek of heart. He catches the note of discord in the prayer of the Pharisee on the street corner, and the jangle of the untuned bells that hang above many houses of worship. He sees strange deeds of nobility and lofty self-denial among people from whose touch respectability draws aside its skirts, and the mark of the beast upon the brow of the high and saintly.
A little here and there he jots down upon his pad; the greater part of the panorama goes by unrecorded until something comes in the vast To Be that will either explain—or end.
Robert Burns has drawn a perfect picture of the purest peace and happiness in his “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” The laborer comes home from his work and is met by his joyful family. The fire burns brightly, the lamp is lit, and they draw the curtains and sit about their humble board, shutting in their little happy world from the cold and bleak night.
There are such homes now and always will be, but if one will traverse the streets of a city on Saturday night he will witness many scenes of a far different nature.
As the homeward bound columns file along the sidewalks there is much to be seen that presages sorrow and scant comfort to the waiting ones at their homes. There are staggering steps, loud speeches with rude and thickened tongues, and plentiful signs of misspent wages and the indulgence of debased appetites.
The saloons are reaping a rich harvest that should belong to wives and children. Some fling away in an hour what has taken them days to earn, and will carry home nothing but sullen looks and empty pockets. You can see all along the streets pale, anxious-looking women slipping through the crowd in the hope of meeting the providers and protectors of their homes, and inducing them to come there instead of lingering with their besotted comrades. What should be a season of rest and repose beneath the home vine and fig tree is turned into Saturnalia, and a loosing of bad passions.
Homeward flit the trim shop girls, the week’s work over, intent on the rest and pleasure of the morrow; threading their straightforward and dextrous way through the throng. Homeward plods the weary housekeeper with her basket of vegetables for Sunday’s dinner. Homeward goes the solid citizen laden with bundles and bags. Homeward slip weary working women, hurrying to fill the hungry mouths awaiting them. Respectability moves homeward, but as the everlasting stars creep out above, queer and warped things steal forth like imps of the night to hide, and sulk, and carouse, and prey upon whatever the darkness bringeth to them.
Down on the bank of the bayou, beyond the car shops, the foundries, the lumbermills and the great manufactories that go to make Houston the wonderful business and trade center she is, stands—or rather, leans—a little shanty. It is made of clapboards, old planks, pieces of tin and odds and ends of lumber picked up here and there. It is built close to the edge of the foul and sluggish bayou. Back of it rises the bank full ten feet high; below it, only a few feet, ripples the sullen tide.
In this squalid hut lives Crip. Crip is nine years old. He is freckled-faced, thin and subdued. From his knee his left leg is gone and in its place is a clumsy wooden stump, on which he limps around at quite a wonderful pace. Crip’s mother cleans up three or four offices on Main Street and takes in washing at other times. Somehow, they manage to live in this tottering habitation patched up by Crip’s father, who several years before had fallen into the bayou one night while drunk, and what was left of him by the catfish was buried upon the bank a hundred yards farther down. Of late, Crip had undertaken to assist in the mutual support.
One morning he came stumping timidly into the office of the Post and purchased a few papers. These he offered for sale upon the streets with great diffidence. Crip had no difficulty in selling his papers. People stopped and bought readily the wares of this shrinking, weak-voiced youngster. His wooden leg caught the eye of hurrying passersby and the nickels rained into his hand as long as he had any papers left.
One morning Crip failed to call for his papers. The next day he did not appear, nor the next, and one of the newsboys was duly questioned as to his absence.
“Crip’s got de pewmonia,” he said.
The Post Man, albeit weighed down by numerous tribulations of others and his own, when night comes puts on his overcoat and wends his way down the bayou toward the home of Crip.
The air is chilly and full of mist, and great puddles left by the recent rains glimmer and sparkle in the electric lights. No wonder that pneumonia has laid its cold hand upon the frail and weakly Crip, living as he does in the rain-soaked shanty down on the water’s edge. The Post Man goes to inquire if he has had a doctor and if he is supplied with the necessities his condition must require. He walks down the railroad tracks and comes close upon two figures marching with uncertain stateliness in the same direction.
One of them speaks loudly, with oratorical flourish, but with an exaggerated carefulness that proclaims he is in a certain stage of intoxication. His voice is well known in the drawing-rooms and the highest social circles of Houston. His name is—well, let us call him Old Boy, for so do his admiring companions denominate him. There comes hurrying past them the form of a somberly-clad woman.
Intuitively the Post Man thinks she is of the house of Crip and accosts her with interrogatories. He gleans from her gasping brogue that a doctor has seen Crip and that he is very sick, but with proper medicines, nursing and food he will probably recover. She is now hastening to the drug store to buy—with her last dollar, she says—the medicine he must take at once.
“I will stay with him until you return,” says the Post Man, and with a fervent “Hiven bless you, sorr!” she melts away toward the lights of the city.
The house where Crip lives is on a kind of shelf on the bayou side and its approach from above must be made down a set of steep and roughly hewn steps cut into the bank by the deceased architect of the house. At the top of these stairs the two society lights stop.
“Old Boy,” says one of them, “give it up. It might be catching. And you are going to the dance tonight. This little rat of a newsboy—why should you see him personally? Come, let’s go back. You’ve had so much—”
“Bobby,” says the Old Boy, “have I labored all these years in vain, trying to convince you that you are an ass? I know I’m a devil of a buzzerfly, and glash of fashion, but I’ve gozzer see zat boy. Sold me papers a week, ’n now zey tell me he’s sick in this ratsh hole down here. Come on, Bobby, or else go’t devil. I’m going in.”
Old Boy pushes his silk hat to the back of his head and starts with dangerous rapidity down the steep stairs.
His friend, seeing that he is determined, takes his arm and they both sway and stagger down to the little shelf of land below.
The Post Man follows them silently, and they are too much occupied with their own unsteady progress to note his presence. He slips around them, raises the latch of the rickety door, stoops and enters the miserable hut.
Crip lies on a meager bed in the corner, with great, feverish eyes, and little, bony, restless fingers moving nervously upon the covers. The night wind blows in streamy draughts between the many crannies and flares the weak flame of a candle stuck in its own grease upon the top of a wooden box.
“Hello, mister,” says Crip. “I knows yer. Yer works on de paper. I been laid up wid a rattlin’ pain in me chist. Who wins de fight?”
“Fitzsimmons won,” says the Post Man, feeling his hot freckled hand. “Are you in much pain?”
“How many rounds?”
“First round. Less than two minutes. Can I do anything to make you easier?”
“Geeminetty! dat was quick. Yer might gimme a drink.”
The door opens again and two magnificent beings enter. Crip gives a little gasp as his quick eyes fall upon them. Old Boy acknowledges the presence of the Post Man by a deep and exaggerated but well intentioned bow, and then he goes and stands by Crip’s bedside.
“Old man,” he says, with solemnly raised eyebrows, “Whazzer mazzer?”
“Sick,” says Crip. “I know yer. Yer gimme a quarter for a paper one mornin’.”
Old Boy’s friend ranges himself in the background. He is a man in a dress suit with a mackintosh and cane, and is not of an obtrusive personality.
He shows an inclination to brace himself against something, but the fragile furniture of the hut not promising much support, he stands uneasily, with a perplexed frown upon his face, awaiting developments.
“You little devil,” says Old Boy, smiling down with mock anger at the little scrap of humanity under the covers, “Do you know why I’ve come to see you?”
“N-n-n-no, sir,” says Crip, the fever flush growing deeper on his cheeks. He has never seen anything so wonderful as this grand, tall, handsome man in his black evening suit, with the dark, half-smiling, half-frowning eyes, and the great diamond flashing on his snowy bosom, and the tall, shiny hat on the back of his head.
“Gen’lemen,” says Old Boy, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, “I don’t know myself, why I have come here, but I couldn’t help it. That little devil’s eyes have been in my head for a week. I’ve never sheen him ’n my life till a week ago; but I’ve sheen his eyes somewhere, long time ago. Sheems to me I knew this little rascal when I was a kid myself ’way back before I left Alabama; but, then, gentlemen, thash impossible. However, as Bobby will tell you, I made him walk all the way down here with me to shee zis little sick fellow, ’n now we mus’ do all we can for ’m.”
Old Boy runs his hands into his pockets and draws out the contents thereof and lays all, with lordly indiscrimination, on the ragged quilt that covers Crip.
“Little devil,” he says solemnly, “you mus’ buy medicine and get well and come back and shell me papers again. Where in thunder have I seen you before? Never mind. Come on, Bobby—good boy to wait for me—come on now and le’s get a zrink.”
The two magnificent gentlemen sway around grandly for a moment, make elaborate but silent adieus in the direction of Crip and the Post Man, and finally dwindle out into the darkness, where they can be heard urging each other forward to the tremendous feat of remounting the steps that lead to the path above.
Presently Crip’s mother returns with his medicine and proceeds to make him comfortable. She gives a screech of surprise at what she sees lying upon the bed, and proceeds to take an inventory. There are $42 in currency, $6.50 in silver, a lady’s silver slipper buckle and an elegant pearl-handled knife with four blades.
The Post Man sees Crip take his medicine and his fever go down, and promising him to bring down a paper that tells all about the great fight, he moves away. A thought strikes him, and he stops near the door and says:
“Your husband, now where was he from?”
“Oh, plaze yer honor,” says Crip’s mother, “from Alabama he was, and a gentleman born, as everyone could tell till the dhrink got away wid him, and thin he married me.”
As the Post Man departs he hears Crip say to his mother reverentially:
“Dat man what left de stuff, mammy, he couldn’t have been God, for God don’t get full; but if it wasn’t him, mammy, I bet a dollar he was Dan Stuart.”
As the Post Man trudges back along the dark road to the city, he says to himself:
“We have seen tonight good springing up where we would never have looked for it, and something of a mystery all the way from Alabama. Heigho! this is a funny little world.”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, March 1, 1896.)
In Mezzotint
The doctor had long ago ceased his hospital practice, but whenever there was a case of special interest among the wards, his spirited team of bays was sure to be seen standing at the hospital gates. Young, handsome, at the head of his profession, possessing an ample income, and married but six months to a beautiful girl who adored him, his lot was certainly one to be envied.
It must have been nine o’clock when he reached home. The stableman took the team, and he ran up the steps lightly. The door opened, and Doris’s arms were flung tightly about his neck, and her wet cheek pressed to his.
“Oh, Ralph,” she said, her voice quivering and plaintive, “you are so late. You can’t think how I miss you when you don’t come at the usual hour. I’ve kept supper warm for you. I’m so jealous of those patients of yours—they keep you from me so much.”
“How fresh and sweet and wholesome you are, after the sights I have to see,” he said, smiling down at her girlish face with the airy confidence of a man who knows himself well beloved. “Now, pour my coffee, little one, while I go up and change clothes.”
After supper he sat in the library in his favorite arm chair, and she sat in her especial place upon the arm of the chair and held a match for him to light his cigar. She seemed so glad to have him with her; every touch was a caress, and every word she spoke had that lingering, loving drawl that a woman uses to but one man—at a time.
“I lost my case of cerebrospinal meningitis tonight,” he said gravely.
“I have you, and I don’t have you,” she said. “Your thoughts are always with your profession, even when I think you are most mine. Ah, well,” with a sigh, “you help the suffering, and I would see all that suffer relieved or else like your cerebro—what is it?—patient, at rest.”
“A queer case, too,” said the doctor, patting his wife’s hand and gazing into the clouds of cigar smoke. “He should have recovered. I had him cured, and he died on my hands without any warning. Ungrateful, too, for I treated that case beautifully. Confound the fellow. I believe he wanted to die. Some nonsensical romance worried him into a fever.”
“A romance? Oh, Ralph, tell it to me. Just think! A romance in a hospital.”
“He tried to tell it to me this morning in snatches between paroxysms of pain. He was bending backward till his head almost touched his heels, and his ribs were nearly cracking, yet he managed to convey something of his life story.”
“Oh, how horrible,” said the doctor’s wife, slipping her arm between his neck and the chair.
“It seems,” went on the doctor, “as well as I could gather, that some girl had discarded him to marry a more well-to-do man, and he lost hope and interest in life, and went to the dogs. No, he refused to tell her name. There was a great pride in that meningitis case. He lied like an angel about his own name, and he gave his watch to the nurse and spoke to her as he would to a queen. I don’t believe I ever will forgive him for dying, for I worked the next thing to a miracle on him. Well, he died this morning, and—let me get a match—oh, yes, here’s a little thing in my pocket he gave me to have buried with him. He told me about starting to a concert with this girl one night, and they decided not to go in, but take a moonlight walk instead. She tore the ticket in two pieces, and gave him one-half and kept the other. Here’s his half, this little red piece of pasteboard with the word ‘Admit—’ printed on it. Look out, little one—that old chair arm is so slippery. Hurt you?”
“No, Ralph. I’m not so easy hurt. What do you think love is, Ralph?”
“Love? Little one! Oh, love is undoubtedly a species of mild insanity. An overbalance of the brain that leads to an abnormal state. It is as much a disease as measles, but as yet, sentimentalists refuse to hand it over to us doctors of medicine for treatment.”
His wife took the half of the little red ticket and held it up. “Admit—” she said, with a little laugh. “I suppose by this time he’s admitted somewhere, isn’t he, Ralph?”
“Somewhere,” said the doctor, lighting his cigar afresh.
“Finish your cigar, Ralph, and then come up,” she said. “I’m a little tired, and I’ll wait for you above.”
“All right, little one,” said the doctor. “Pleasant dreams!” He smoked the cigar out, and then lit another.
It was nearly eleven when he went upstairs.
The light in his wife’s room was turned low, and she lay upon her bed undressed. As he stepped to her side and raised her hand, some steel instrument fell and jingled upon the floor, and he saw upon the white countenance a creeping red horror that froze his blood.
He sprang to the lamp and turned up the blaze. As he parted his lips to send forth a shout, he paused for a moment, with his eyes upon his dead patient’s half ticket that lay upon the table. The other half had been neatly fitted to it, and it now read:
Admit Two
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, April 26, 1896.)
The Dissipated Jeweler
You will not find the name of Thomas Keeling in the Houston city directory. It might have been there by this time, if Mr. Keeling had not discontinued his business a month or so ago and moved to other parts. Mr. Keeling came to Houston about that time and opened up a small detective bureau. He offered his services to the public as a detective in rather a modest way. He did not aspire to be a rival of the Pinkerton agency, but preferred to work along less risky lines.
If an employer wanted the habits of a clerk looked into, or a lady wanted an eye kept upon a somewhat too gay husband, Mr. Keeling was the man to take the job. He was a quiet, studious man with theories. He read Gaboriau and Conan Doyle and hoped some day to take a higher place in his profession. He had held a subordinate place in a large detective bureau in the East, but as promotion was slow, he decided to come West, where the field was not so well covered.
Mr. Keeling had saved during several years the sum of $900, which he deposited in the safe of a business man in Houston to whom he had letters of introduction from a common friend. He rented a small upstairs office on an obscure street, hung out a sign stating his business, and burying himself in one of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, waited for customers.
Three days after he opened his bureau, which consisted of himself, a client called to see him.
It was a young lady, apparently about 26 years of age. She was slender and rather tall and neatly dressed. She wore a thin veil which she threw back upon her black straw hat after she had taken the chair Mr. Keeling offered her. She had a delicate, refined face, with rather quick gray eyes, and a slightly nervous manner.
“I came to see you, sir,” she said in a sweet, but somewhat sad, contralto voice, “because you are comparatively a stranger, and I could not bear to discuss my private affairs with any of my friends. I desire to employ you to watch the movements of my husband. Humiliating as the confession is to me, I fear that his affections are no longer mine. Before I married him he was infatuated with a young woman connected with a family with whom he boarded. We have been married five years, and very happily, but this young woman has recently moved to Houston, and I have reasons to suspect that he is paying her attentions. I want you to watch his movements as closely as possible and report to me. I will call here at your office every other day at a given time to learn what you have discovered. My name is Mrs. R——, and my husband is well known. He keeps a small jewelry store on Street. I will pay you well for your services and here is $20 to begin with.”
The lady handed Mr. Keeling the bill and he took it carelessly as if such things were very, very common in his business.
He assured her that he would carry out her wishes faithfully, and asked her to call again the afternoon after the next at four o’clock, for the first report.
The next day Mr. Keeling made the necessary inquiries toward beginning operations. He found the jewelry store, and went inside ostensibly to have the crystal of his watch tightened. The jeweler, Mr. R——, was a man apparently 35 years of age, of very quiet manners and industrious ways. His store was small, but contained a nice selection of goods and quite a large assortment of diamonds, jewelry and watches. Further inquiry elicited the information that Mr. R was a man of excellent habits, never drank and was always at work at his jeweler’s bench.
Mr. Keeling loafed around near the door of the jewelry store for several hours that day and was finally rewarded by seeing a flashily dressed young woman with black hair and eyes enter the store. Mr. Keeling sauntered nearer the door, where he could see what took place inside. The young woman walked confidently to the rear of the store, leaned over the counter and spoke familiarly to Mr. R——. He rose from his bench and they talked in low tones for a few minutes. Finally, the jeweler handed her some coins, which Mr. Keeling heard clinking as they passed into her hands. The woman then came out and walked rapidly down the street.
Mr. Keeling’s client was at his office promptly at the time agreed upon. She was anxious to know if he had seen anything to corroborate her suspicions. The detective told her what he had seen.
“That is she,” said the lady, when he had described the young woman who had entered the store. “The brazen, bold thing! And so Charles is giving her money. To think that things should come to this pass.”
The lady pressed her handkerchief to her eyes in an agitated way.
“Mrs. R——,” said the detective, “what is your desire in this matter? To what point do you wish me to prosecute inquiries?”
“I want to see with my own eyes enough to convince me of what I suspect. I also want witnesses, so I can instigate suit for divorce. I will not lead the life I am now living any longer.”
She then handed the detective a ten-dollar bill.
On the day following the next, when she came to Mr. Keeling’s office to hear his report, he said:
“I dropped into the store this afternoon on some trifling pretext. This young woman was already there, but she did not remain long. Before she left, she said: ‘Charlie, we will have a jolly little supper tonight as you suggest; then we will come around to the store and have a nice chat while you finish that setting for the diamond broach with no one to interrupt us.’ Tonight, Mrs. R——, I think, will be a good time for you to witness the meeting between your husband and the object of his infatuation, and satisfy your mind how matters stand.”
“The wretch,” cried the lady with flashing eyes. “He told me at dinner that he would be detained late tonight with some important work. And this is the way he spends his time away from me!”
“I suggest,” said the detective, “that you conceal yourself in the store, so you can hear what they say, and when you have heard enough you can summon witnesses and confront your husband before them.”
“The very thing,” said the lady. “I believe there is a policeman whose beat is along the street the store is on who is acquainted with our family. His duties will lead him to be in the vicinity of the store after dark. Why not see him, explain the whole matter to him and when I have heard enough, let you and him appear as witnesses?”
“I will speak with him,” said the detective, “and persuade him to assist us, and you will please come to my office a little before dark tonight, so we can arrange to trap them.”
The detective hunted up the policeman and explained the situation.
“That’s funny,” said the guardian of the peace. “I didn’t know R—— was a gay boy at all. But, then, you can never tell about anybody. So his wife wants to catch him tonight. Let’s see, she wants to hide herself inside the store and hear what they say. There’s a little room in the back of the store where R—— keeps his coal and old boxes. The door between is locked, of course, but if you can get her through that into the store she can hide somewhere. I don’t like to mix up in these affairs, but I sympathize with the lady. I’ve known her ever since we were children and don’t mind helping her to do what she wants.”
About dusk that evening the detective’s client came hurriedly to his office. She was dressed plainly in black and wore a dark round hat and her face was covered with a veil.
“If Charlie should see me he will not recognize me,” she said.
Mr. Keeling and the lady strolled down the street opposite the jewelry store, and about eight o’clock the young woman they were watching for entered the store. Immediately afterwards she came out with Mr. R——, took his arm, and they hurried away, presumably to their supper.
The detective felt the arm of the lady tremble.
“The wretch,” she said bitterly. “He thinks me at home innocently waiting for him while he is out carousing with that artful, designing minx. Oh, the perfidy of man.”
Mr. Keeling took the lady through an open hallway that led into the back yard of the store. The outer door of the back room was unlocked, and they entered.
“In the store,” said Mrs. R——, “near the bench where my husband works is a large table, the cover of which hangs to the floor. If I could get under that I could hear every word that was said.”
Mr. Keeling took a big bunch of skeleton keys from his pocket and in a few minutes found one that opened the door into the jewelry store. The gas was burning from one jet turned very low.
The lady stepped into the store and said: “I will bolt this door from the inside, and I want you to follow my husband and that woman. See if they are at supper, and if they are, when they start back, you must come back to this room and let me know by tapping thrice on the door. After I listen to their conversation long enough I will unbolt the door, and we will confront the guilty pair together. I may need you to protect me, for I do not know what they might attempt to do to me.”
The detective made his way softly out and followed the jeweler and the woman. He soon discovered that they had taken a private room in a little out of the way restaurant and had ordered supper. He lingered about until they came out and then hurried back to the store, and entering the back room, tapped three times on the door.
In a few minutes the jeweler entered with the woman and the detective saw the light shine more brightly through a crack in the door. He could hear the man and woman conversing familiarly and constantly, but could not distinguish their words. He slipped around again to the street, and looking through the window, could see Mr. R—— working away at his jeweler’s bench, while the black-haired woman sat close to his side and talked.
“I’ll give them a little time,” thought Mr. Keeling, and he strolled down the street.
The policeman was standing on the corner.
The detective told him that Mrs. R—— was concealed in the store, and that the scheme was working nicely.
“I’ll drop back behind now,” said Mr. Keeling, “so as to be ready when the lady springs her trap.”
The policeman walked back with him, and took a look through the window.
“They seem to have made up all right,” said he. “Where’s the other woman gotten to?”
“Why, there she is sitting by him,” said the detective.
“I’m talking about the girl R—— had out to supper.”
“So am I,” said the detective.
“You seem to be mixed up,” said the policeman. “Do you know that lady with R——?”
“That’s the woman he was out with.”
“That’s R——’s wife,” said the policeman. “I’ve known her for fifteen years.”
“Then, who—?” gasped the detective, “Lord A’mighty, then who’s under the table?”
Mr. Keeling began to kick at the door of the store. Mr. R—— came forward and opened it. The policeman and the detective entered. “Look under that table, quick,” yelled the detective.
The policeman raised the cover and dragged out a blade dress, a black veil and a woman’s wig of black hair.
“Is this lady your w-w-wife?” asked Mr. Keeling excitedly, pointing out the dark-eyed young woman, who was regarding them in great surprise.
“Certainly,” said the jeweler. “Now what the thunder are you looking under my tables and kicking down my door for, if you please?”
“Look in your show cases,” said the policeman, who began to size up the situation.
The diamond rings and watches that were missing amounted to $800, and the next day the detective settled the bill.
Explanations were made to the jeweler that night, and an hour later Mr. Keeling sat in his office busily engaged in looking over his albums of crook’s photos.
At last he found one, and he stopped turning over the leaves and tore his hair. Under the picture of a smooth-faced young man, with delicate features was the following description:
“James H. Miggles, alias Slick Simon, alias The Weeping Widow, alias Bunco Kate, alias Jimmy the Sneak, General confidence man and burglar. Works generally in female disguises. Very plausible and dangerous. Wanted in Kansas City, Oshkosh, New Orleans and Milwaukee.”
This is why Mr. Thomas Keeling did not continue his detective business in Houston.
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, May 17, 1896.)
How Willie Saved Father
Willie Flint was a little Houston boy, six years of age. He was a beautiful child, with long golden curls and wondering, innocent blue eyes. His father was a respectable, sober citizen, who owned four or five large business buildings on Main Street. All day long Mr. Flint toiled among his renters, collecting what was due him, patching up broken window panes, nailing down loose boards and repairing places where the plastering had fallen off. At noon he would sit down upon the stairs of one of his buildings and eat the frugal dinner he had brought, wrapped up in a piece of newspaper, and think about the hard times. Gay and elegantly attired clerks and business men would pass up and down the stairs, but Mr. Flint did not envy them. He lived in a little cottage near the large trash pile known as “Tomato Can Heights,” on one of the principal residence streets of Houston. He was perfectly contented to live there with his wife and little boy Willie, and eat his frugal but wholesome fare and draw his $1,400 per month rent for his buildings. He was industrious and temperate, and hardly a day passed that he did not raise the rent of some of his offices, and lay by a few more dollars for a rainy day.
One night Mr. Flint came home ill. He had been pasting up some cheap green wall paper on an empty stomach, or rather on the wall of one of his stores without eating, and it had not agreed with him. He went to bed flushed with fever, muttering: “God help my poor wife and child! What will become of them now?”
Mr. Flint sent Willie to the other side of the room and drew a roll of greenbacks from under his pillow.
“Take this,” he said to his wife, “to the bank and deposit it. There is only $900 there. Some of my renters have not paid me yet, and five of them want awnings put up at the windows. He who sent the ravens to feed Elijah will provide for us. Come by the baker’s and get a nickel loaf of bread, and then hurry back and pray.”
Willie was pretending to play with his Noah’s ark, by charging the animals for rent and water, and adding the amounts on his slate, but he heard what his father said.
As his mother went out, he asked: “Mamma, is papa too sick to work?”
“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Flint; “he has a high fever, and I fear will be very ill.”
After his mother had gone Willie put on his hat and slipped out the front door.
“I want to do something to help my good, kind papa, who is sick,” he said to himself.
He wandered up to Main Street and stood looking at the tall buildings that his poor father owned.
Passersby smiled when they saw the little flaxen-haired boy, and many a rough face softened at the sight of his innocent blue eyes.
Poor little Willie. What could he do in the great, busy city to help his sick father?
“I know what I will do,” he said to himself presently. “I will go up and raise the rent of several offices and that will make my papa feel better.”
Willie toiled up three flights of stairs of one of his father’s largest buildings. He had to sit down quite often and rest, for he was short on wind.
Away up to the third story was an office rented by two young men who had just begun to practice law. They had their sign out, and had given their note to Mr. Flint for the first month’s rent. As Willie climbed the stairs the young lawyers were eating some cheese and crackers, with their feet on their desks, and six empty quart beer bottles stood upon a table. They were breathing hard, and one of them, who had a magnolia in his buttonhole, was telling a funny story about a girl.
Presently one of them took his feet off his desk, opened his eyes and said:
“Jeeminy! Bob, get onto his Fauntleroyets.”
The gentleman addressed as Bob also took his feet down, wiped his knife, with which he had been slicing cheese, on his hair, and looked around.
A little blue-eyed boy with long golden curls stood in the doorway.
“Come in, sissy,” said one of the young men.
Willie walked boldly into the room.
“I’m not a girl,” he said. “My name is Willie Flint, and I’ve come to raise the rent.”
“Now, that’s kind of you, Willie,” said the young man called Bob, “to come and do that, for we couldn’t do it if we were to be electrocuted. Is that your own hair, Willie, or do you ride a bicycle?”
“Don’t worry the little boy,” said the other young gentleman, whom Bob addressed as Sam. “I’m sure that this is a nice little boy. I say, Willie, did you ever hear a gumdrop?”
“Don’t tease him,” said Bob severely. “He reminds me of someone—excuse my tears—those curls, those bloomers. Say, Willie, speak quick, my child—two hundred and ten years ago, were you standing—”
“Oh, let him alone,” said Sam, frowning at the other young gentleman. “Willie, as a personal favor, would you mind weeping a while on the floor? I am overcome by ennui, and would be moved to joy.”
“My papa is very ill,” said Willie, bravely forcing back his tears, “and something must be done for him. Please, kind gentleman, let me raise the rent of this office so I can go back and tell him and make him better.”
“It’s old Flint’s kid,” said Bob. “Don’t he make your face wide? Say, Willie, how much do you want to raise the rent?”
“What do you pay now?” asked Willie.
“Ten dollars a month.”
“Could you make it twelve?”
“Call it fifty,” said Sam, lighting a black cigar, “at ninety days, and open the beer, Willie, and it’s a deal.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Bob. “I say, Willie, you may raise the rent to twenty dollars if you like, and run and tell your father, if it will do him any good.”
“Oh, thank you,” cried Willie, and he ran home with a light heart, singing merrily.
When he got home he found Mr. Flint sinking fast and muttering something about giving his wife a ten-dollar bill.
“He is out of his head,” said Mrs. Flint, bursting into tears.
Willie ran to the bed and whispered to his father’s ear: “Papa, I have raised the rent of one of your offices from ten to twenty dollars.”
“You, my child!” said his father, laying his hand on Willie’s head. “God bless my brave little boy.”
Mr. Flint sank into a peaceful slumber and his fever left him. The next day he was able to sit up, and feeling much stronger, when Willie told him whose rent it was he had raised.
Mr. Flint then fell dead.
Alas! messieurs, life is full of disappointments!
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, May 3, 1896.)
The Mirage on the Frio
The sheep man rejected the offer of a match, and lit his pipe from a burning brand. We were down on Buffalo Bayou fishing, and had cooked and eaten supper. Fried fresh fish, coffee, corn bread, potatoes, and just enough crisp bacon to flavor gave us a supper at which none murmured.
We reclined at ease and worshipped the goddess Nicotine. The moon made a glory in the eastern sky and spread a white shimmering glamour upon the black water of the bayou. A phantom tug crept down stream, leaving a ghostly, wavering silver wake, and a mysterious lapping and washing along the unseen shores. Mosquitoes hummed angrily about the borders of the hanging cloud of tobacco smoke. A dank fresh smell arose from bursting buds and wild flowers. We five sat in the chiaroscuro of the live oaks and cypresses, and babbled as most men and all women will when Night, the tongue loosener, succeeds the discrete Day.
Night should be held responsible for poets, breach of promise suits, betrayed secrets and dull stories. The man who will not tell more than he knows in the moonlight of a spring night is a rarity. Four of us were more or less hardened to moonlight and roses; one among us was young enough to note the soft effect of Luna’s kiss upon the dim tree tops, the aerial perspective of the drifting gulf clouds, and the dim white eyes of the dogwood blossoms peering out of the wooded darkness. He noted and spake his thoughts without stint of adjectives, while we world-worn passengers grunted in reply; puffed at our cigars and pipes, and refused to commit ourselves on such trifling matters.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” asked the young man. “The sky like the derne of some dream temple, the woods dark with mystery and the silence broken only by the faint breathing of nature.”
“It’s nice, and no mistake,” answered the insurance agent, “but let me tell you, I’ve known men to plant the seeds of incurable disease along this old bayou. Feel that dampness rising every minute? A fellow never knows what is going to happen. Especially a man with a family dependent on him should—”
“Shut up,” snapped the druggist. “For talking shop, recommend me to a man in your line. This is a pleasure trip we are on, and I have to have it spoiled by ringing in business. Talk about your malaria, why, two bottles of my—”
“There you go, just as bad,” said the lawyer. “You fellows have run in the same old rut so long you can’t get your minds on anything else. Put me on the witness stand, and I’ll swear that I never mention my own business outside of my office; if I don’t, kick me clean out of court.”
“This night,” said the sheep man, “reminds me of the night I was lost in the brush along the Frio. That was the night before the morning I seen the mi-ridge.”
“The—ah—oh! the mirage?” said the young man.
“No,” said the sheep man, “it wasn’t no mi-rosh; this was a mi-ridge, and the plainest one I ever seen. They happened somethin’ queer about this one, too, and I don’t often tell it, after seein’ that incredoolity generally waits upon the relatin’ of it.”
“Light up,” said the druggist, reaching for the tobacco sack, “and let us have your yarn. There are very few things a man can’t believe nowadays.”
“It was in the fall of ’80,” said the sheep man, “when I was runnin’ sheep in La Salle County. There came a norther that scattered my flock of 1500 muttons to thunderation. The shepherd couldn’t hold ’em and they split up right and left, through the chaparral. I got on my hoss and hunted all one day, and I rounded up the biggest part of ’em during the afternoon. I seen a Mexican ridin’ along what told me they was a big ’tajo of ’em down near the Palo Blanco crossin’ of the Frio. I rode over that way, and when sundown come I was down in a big mesquite flat, where I couldn’t see fifty yards before me any ways. Well, I got lost. For some four or five hours my pony stumbled around in the sacuista grass, windin’ about this way and that, without knowin’ any more than I did where he was at. ’Bout 12 o’clock I give it up, staked my pony and laid down under my saddle blanket to wait till mornin’. I was awful worried about my wife and the kid, who was by themselves on the ranch, for I knew they’d be scared half to death. There wasn’t much to be afraid of, but you know how women folks are when night comes, ’specially when they wasn’t any neighbor in ten miles of ’em.
“I was up at daylight, and soon as I’d got my bearin’s I knowed just where I was. Right where I was I seen the Fort Ewell road, and a big dead elm on one side that I knew. I was just eighteen miles from my ranch. I jumped in the saddle, when all at once, looking across the Frio towards home, I seen this mi-ridge. These mi-ridges are sure wonderful. I never seen but three or four. It was a kind of misty mornin’, with woolly gulf clouds a-flyin’ across, and the hollows was all hazy. I seen my ranch house, shearin’ pen, the fences with saddles hangin’ on ’em, the wood pile, with the ax stickin’ in a log, and everything about the yard as plain as if they was only 200 yards away, and I was lookin’ at ’em on a foggy mornin’. Everything looked somewhat ghostly like, and a little taller and bigger than it really was, but I could see even the white curtains at the windows and the pet sheep grazin’ ’round the corral. It made me feel funny to see everything so close, when I knew I was eighteen miles away.
“All to once I seen the door open, and wife come out with the kid in her arms. It was all I could do to keep from hollerin’ at her. You bet, I was glad to see her anyhow, and know they was all safe. Just then I seen somethin’ big and black a-movin’, and it growed plainer, like it had kinder come into focus, and it was a Mexican with a broad-brimmed sombrero, on a hoss what rode up to the fence. He stopped there a minute and then I seen my wife run into the house and shut the door. I seen the Mexican jump off his hoss, try the door, and then go and get the ax at the wood pile. He came back and commenced to split down the door. The mi-ridge commenced to get dimmer and faint like. I don’t know what made me do such a fool thing, but I couldn’t help it. I jerked my Winchester out’n its scabbard, drawed a bead on the darned scoundrel and fired. Then I cussed myself for an idiot, for tryin’ to shoot somethin’ eighteen miles away, jabbed my Winchester back in the scabbard, stuck my spurs in my broncho, and split through the brush like a roadrunner after a rattlesnake.
“I made that eighteen miles in eighty minutes. I never took the road, but crashed through the chaparral, jumped prickly pear and arroyo just as they come. When I got to the ranch I fell off my pony, and he leaned up against the fence streamin’ wet and lookin’ at me mighty reproachful. I never breathed in jumpin’ from the fence to the back door. I clattered up the steps and yelled for Sallie, but my voice sounded to me like somebody else’s, ’way off. The door opened and out tumbled the wife and the kid, all right, but scared as wild ducks. ‘Oh, Jim,’ says the wife, ‘where, oh where have you been? A drunken Mexican attacked the house this morning and tried to cut down the door with an ax.’ I tried to ask some questions, but I couldn’t. ‘Look,’ says Sallie.
“The other door was busted all to pieces and the ax was lyin’ on the step, and the Mexican was lyin’ on the ground and a Winchester ball had passed clear through his head.”
“Who shot him?” asked the lawyer.
“I’ve told you all I know,” said the sheep man. “Sallie said the man dropped all of a sudden while he was choppin’ at the door, and she never heard no gun shoot. I don’t pretend to explain nothin’, I’m telling you what happened. You might say somebody in the brush seen him breakin’ in the door and shot him, usin’ noiseless powder, and then slipped away without leavin’ his card, or you might say you don’t know nothin’ at all about it, as I do.”
“Do you think—” began the young man.
“No, I don’t think,” said the sheep man, rather shortly. “I said I’d tell you about the mi-ridge I seen, and I told you just as it happened. Is they any coffee left in that pot?”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, April 19, 1896.)
A Tragedy
“By the beard of the Prophet. Oh, Scheherezade, right well hast thou done,” said the Caliph, leaning back and biting off the end of a three-for.
For one thousand nights Scheherezade No. 2, daughter of the Grand Vizier, had sat at the feet of the mighty Caliph of the Indies relating tales that held the court entranced and breathless.
The soft, melodious sound of falling water from the fountain tinkled pleasantly upon the ear. Slaves sprinkled attar of roses upon the tessellated floor, and waved jeweled fans of peacock’s feathers in the air. Outside, in the palace gardens the bulbul warbled in the date trees, the hoodoo flitted among the banyan branches, and the dying song of the goo-goo floated in upon the breeze from New York.
“And, now, oh, Scheherezade,” continued the Caliph, “your contract calls for one more tale. One thousand have you told unto us, and we have rejoiced exceedingly at your narrative powers. Your stories are all new and do not weary us as do the chestnuts of Marshall P. Wilder. You are quite a peach. But, listen, oh, Daughter of the Moon, and first cousin to a phonograph, there is one more yet to come. Let it be one that has never before been related in the Kingdom. If it be thus, thou shalt have 10,000 gold pieces and a hundred slaves at thy command, but if it bear whiskers, then shall thy head pay the forfeit.”
The Caliph made a sign, and Mesrour, the executioner, stepped to the side of Scheherezade. In his dark hand he held a glittering scimeter. He folded his arms and stood like a statue as the Caliph spoke again.
“Now, oh, Scheherezade, let her go. If it be that thou givest us something like that tale No. 475, where the Bagdad merchant was found by his favorite wife at the roof-garden concert, with his typewriter, or No. 684, where the Cadi of a certain town came home late from the lodge with his shoes off and stepped upon a tack, all will be well, but if you work off a Joe Miller on us, verily you get it in the neck.”
Scheherezade took a fresh chew of gum, sat down on one foot and began.
“Oh, mighty Caliph, I have one story that would hold you spellbound. I call it my 288 story. But I really can not tell it. I—”
“And why not, oh, Scheherezade?”
“Oh, Brother to the Sun, and Private Secretary to the Milky Way, I am a modest woman, it is too gross, too gross to relate.”
Scheherezade covered her face in confusion.
“Speak, I command you,” said the Caliph, drawing nearer. “You need not mind me. I have read Laura Lean Jibbey and Isben. Go on with 288.”
“I have said it, oh, Caliph. It is too gross.”
The Caliph made a sign: Mesrour, the executioner, whirled his scimeter through the air and the head of Scheherezade rolled upon the floor. The Caliph pulled his beard and muttered softly to himself:
“I knew all the time that 288 is two gross, but puns don’t go anywhere in my jurisdiction at present.”
(Houston Daily Post, Friday morning, November 8, 1895.)
Sufficient Provocation
“He hit me fust.”
“He gimme de probumcation, judge.”
“Nebber touched dat nigger tell he up en hit me wid er cheer.”
They were two Houston negroes, and they were up before the recorder for fighting.
“What did you strike this man with a chair for?” asked the recorder.
“I wuz playin’ de French hahp, judge, to de ball ob de Sebem ’Mancipated Sons ob de Lebem Virgins, en Sam Hobson he wuz playin’ de guitar fur de niggers to dance by. Dis here coon what I hit thinks he kin play de French hahp, too, but he kaint.”
“Dat’s a lie, I kin play—”
“Keep still,” said the recorder sternly. “Go on with your statement.”
“I wuz playin’ en up comes dis here coon what I hit. He am pow’ful jealous ob my playin’ en he wuz mad ’coz de flo’ committee selected me to puhfahm. While I wuz playin’ dis obstrepelous coon came right close up to me en he say: ‘Watermillions be gittin’ ripe now in nudder mont’. I keeps on playin’. He says: ‘Sposin’ you had a great big ripe watermillion, wid red meat en black seeds.’ I keeps on playin’. He says: ‘You take him en bus him open on a rock, en you scoop up a big han’ful ob de heart, en you look all roun’ en nobody come.’ I keeps on playin. He says: ‘You cram de heart in yo’ mouf, en crunch down on hit, en de juice hit run down yo’ ahm en hit run down yo’ chin to yo’ neck, en de sweetness run down you’ th’oat.’ Den my mouf water so it fill dat French hahp plum full, en de music stop, en de flo’ committee look aroun’. Den I up wit a chair en bus’ dis coon ober de head, en I flings myself on de mussy ob dis co’t, kase, Mars Judge, you knows what dese here sandy lan’ watermillions is yo’sef.”
“Get out of here, both of you,” said the recorder. “Next case.”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, May 17, 1896.)
The Bruised Reed
The popular preacher sat in his study before a glowing grate, and a satisfied smile stole over his features, as he remembered his sermon of that morning. He had struck strong blows at sin; relating to his breathless congregation in plain and burning words, tales of the wickedness, debauchery, drunkenness and depravity that was going on in their very midst.
Following the prominent example of a certain pureminded and original servant of the Lord, he had gone down himself among the lowest haunts of vice and iniquity, and there sketched in his mind those flaming and accusive portraits that he had painted before the astonished eyes of his congregation, with a broad brush and vivid colors. He had heard blasphemies from lips that were once as pure as his sisters’; he had stood in the midst of unbridled vice, where wine flowed like water and amidst songs, curses, laughing and revelry, the chink of money, earned by dripping hearts’ blood, could be heard as it fell into the coffers of the devil. Oh, he had astonished his flock! He had hurled at them fiery words of blame that these things were allowed to exist. It had been a new departure for him, but he expected grand results. And now he sat by his anthracite fire, and thought over the success of his labors, and smiled with satisfaction. The latch of his study door clicked and a being entered. He was grizzly, rum-soaked, dirty, ragged, disreputable, blear-eyed and of uncertain step. Once, he might have been a man.
Across his forehead stretched a long strip of dingy court plaster; on the bridge of his nose an unhealed wound showed scarlet against the milder red of his face. He brought with him an odor of disrespectability, rum and unsanctification.
The preacher rose; a slight distension visible in his delicate nostril; a little shiver of repulsion rippling through his broadcloth-vestured figure. “What is it, my good man?” he asked.
The being spoke, and the preacher still standing, followed him through the husky labyrinth of his speech.
“Don’t yer know me? I lives in ‘Hell’s Delight.’ I knows you. You come down, you did, and wants ter take in ther sights. You asks Tony, the Dago, fer a guide and he sends yer to Creepy Jake. That’s me. I takes yer through the dives, one and all. I knows yer a preacher from the way yer did. Yer buys the wine like a gent, though—like a real, high roller gent; anybody would ’a took yer fer a gent.”
“Excuse me,” said the preacher, “that wound on your forehead—the blood seems to be dripping on those engravings—allow me—”
“Keep your hankcher, reverend,” said the being, as he raised a ragged coat tail and wiped the drops from his brow. “I won’t spile yer pictures. I’ll git off en yer carpet, and let some fresh air in in a minute. One time I could ’a told yer all about them pictures—dat’s Una and de lion—dat one’s the Venus of Milo—de other one’s the disc thrower—you wouldn’t believe, reverend, that I knowed de names, would you? One time I set in cheers like dat—I allus liked dat Spanish leather upholstering, but your wainscotin’ ain’t right. De carvin’s allegorical and it don’t suit de modern panels—‘scuse me, reverend, dat ain’t what I come to say. After you took in de Tenderloin, I got to tinkin’ bout somethin’ you said one night after I went wid you to de tough dance at Gilligan’s. Dey was a cove dere dat twigged you as a parson and was about to biff you one on de ear, but he see’d my gun showin’ down in my pocket, and den he see’d my eye, and changed his mind—but dat’s all right. You says to yerself dat night, but I heard yer: ‘De bruised reed he shall not quench, and de smokin’ flax he will not put out,’ or somethin’ like dat, and I got ter studyin’ over what a low down bum I’ve been, and I says, ‘I’m goin’ to de big bug church, and hear de bloke preach.’
“De boys an’ de tinhorns gimme de laugh and called me ‘Pious Jake,’ but today I went to der big church where you preaches, reverend. I says to myself dat I showed you round de Tenderloin, and stood by you when de rounders guyed you, and never let de coves work de flimflam on yer, and when I heard tell of the big sermons yer was preachin’ and de hot shot yer was shootin’ into de tough gang, I was real proud, and I felt like I kinder had a share in de business fer havin’ gone de rounds with yer. I says I’ll hear dat cove preach, and maybe de bruised reed’ll git a chance to straighten up—‘scuse me, reverend, don’t git skeared, I ain’t goin’ to fall and spile yer carpet. I’m a little groggy. That cut on my head is bled a heap, but I ain’t drunk.”
“Perhaps you would like—possibly, if you would sit—just for a moment—”