by O. Henry
“ ‘Ruins!’ says Major Bing. ‘The woods are full of ’em. I don’t know how far they date back, but they was here before I came.’
“High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are addicted to.
“ ‘Why,’ says the Major, rubbing his nose, ‘I can’t hardly say. I imagine it’s infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that. There’s a church here—a Methodist or some other kind—with a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don’t assimilate except on state occasions. I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But Skidder says he has ’em in the fold.’
“A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles. Then a branch turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against the finest ruin you ever saw—solid stone with trees and vines and underbrush all growing up against it and in it and through it. All over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people, that would have been arrested if they’d ever come out in vaudeville that way. We approached it from the rear.
“High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in Boca. You know how an Indian is—the palefaces fixed his clock when they introduced him to firewater. He’d brought a quart along with him.
“ ‘Hunky,’ says he, ‘we’ll explore the ancient temple. It may be that the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology,’ says he, ‘may yet profit by the vagaries of wind and tide.’
“We went in the rear door of the bum edifice. We struck a kind of alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport, and a stone washstand without any soap or exit for the water and some hardwood pegs drove into holes in the wall, and that was all. To go out of that furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East Side Settlement house.
“While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor, six little windows like square-port-holes that didn’t let much light in.
“I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack’s face three feet away.
“ ‘High,’ says I, ‘of all the—’
And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.
“He’d taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn’t seem to hear me. I touched him, and came near beating it. High Jack had turned to stone. I had been drinking some rum myself.
“ ‘Ossified!’ I says to him, loudly. ‘I knew what would happen if you kept it up.’
“And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr. Snakefeeder No. 2. It’s a stone idol, or god, or revised statue or something, and it looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself. It’s got exactly his face and size and color, but it’s steadier on its pins. It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see it’s been there ten million years.
“ ‘He’s a cousin of mine,’ sings High, and then he turns solemn.
“ ‘Hunky,’ he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the statue‘s, ‘I’m in the holy temple of my ancestors.’
“ ‘Well, if looks goes for anything,’ says I, ‘you’ve struck a twin. Stand side by side with buddy, and let’s see if there’s any difference.’
“There wasn’t. You know an Indian can keep his face as still as an iron dog’s when he wants to, so when High Jack froze his features you couldn’t have told him from the other one.
“ ‘There’s some letters,’ says I, ‘on his nob’s pedestal, but I can’t make ’em out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of sometimes a, e, i, o, and u, generally, z‘s, l’s, and t’s.
“High Jack’s ethnology gets the upper hand of his rum for a minute, and he investigates the inscription.
“ ‘Hunky,’ says he, ‘this is a statue of Tlotopaxl, one of the most powerful gods of the ancient Aztecs.’
“ ‘Glad to know him,’ says I, ‘but in his present condition he reminds me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Caesar. We might say about your friend:
“Imperious What’s his-name, dead and turned to stone—
No use to write or call him on the phone.”
“ ‘Hunky,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, ‘do you believe in reincarnation?’
“ ‘It sounds to me,’ says I, ‘like either a clean-up of the slaughter-houses or a new kind of Boston pink. I don’t know.’
“ ‘I believe,’ says he, ‘that I am the reincarnation of Tlotopaxl. My researches have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the proud Aztec race. That,’ says he, ‘was a favorite theory of mine and Florence Blue Feather’s. And she—what if she—’
“High Jack grabs my arm and walls his eyes at me. Just then he looked more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, Crazy Horse.
“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘what if she, what if she, what if she? You’re drunk,’ says I. ‘Impersonating idols and believing in—what was it?—recarnalization? Let’s have a drink,’ says I. ‘It’s as spooky here as a Brooklyn artificial-limb factory at midnight with the gas turned down.’
“Just then I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the bedless bedchamber. There was peepholes bored through the wall, so we could see the whole front part of the temple. Major Bing told me afterward that the ancient priests in charge used to rubber through them at the congregation.
“In a few minutes an old Indian woman came in with a big oval earthen dish full of grub. She set it on a square block of stone in front of the graven image, and laid down and walloped her face on the floor a few times, and then took a walk for herself.
“High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over. There was goat steaks and fried rice-cakes, and plaintains and casava, and broiled land-crabs and mangoes—nothing like what you get at Chubb’s.
“We ate hearty—and had another round of rum.
“ ‘It must be old Tecumseh’s—or whatever you call him— birthday,’ says 1. ‘Or do they feed him every day? I thought gods only drank vanilla on Mount Catawampus.’
“Then some more native parties in short kimonos that showed their aboriginees puncture the near-horizon, and me and Hugh had to skip back into Father Axletree’s private boudoir. They came by ones, twos, and threes, and left all sorts of offerings—there was enough grub for Bingham’s nine gods of war, with plenty left over for the Peace Conference at The Hague. They brought jars of honey, and bunches of bananas, and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas, and beautiful shawls worth one hundred dollars apiece that the Indian women weave of a kind of vegetable fiber like silk. All of ‘em got down and wriggled on the floor in front of that hard-finish god, and then sneaked off through the woods again.
“ ‘I wonder who gets this rake-off?’ remarks High Jack.
“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘there’s priests or deputy idols or a committee of disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job. Wherever you find a god you’ll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt offerings.’
“And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlor front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as a summer camp on the Palisades.
“And while we stood there in the breeze we looks down the path and sees a young lady approaching the blasted ruin. She was barefooted and had on a white robe, and carried a wreath of white flowers in her hand. When she got nearer we saw she had a long blue feather stuck through her black hair. And when she got nearer still me and High Jack Snakefeeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down on the floor; for the girl’s face was as much like Florence Blue Feather’s as his was like old King Toxicology’s.
“And then was when High Jack’s booze drowned his system o
f ethnology. He dragged me inside back of the statue, and says:
“ ‘Lay hold of it, Hunky. We’ll pack it into the other room. I felt it all the time,’ says he. ‘I’m the reconsideration of the god Locomotorataxia, and Florence Blue Feather was my bride a thousand years ago. She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to reign.’
“ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘There’s no use arguing against the rum question. You take his feet.’
“We lifted the three-hundred-pound stone god, and carried him into the back room of the cafe—the temple, I mean—and leaned him against the wall. It was more work than bouncing three live ones from an all night Broadway joint on New-Year’s Eve.
“Then High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them Indian silk shawls and began to undress himself.
“ ‘Oh, figs!’ says I. ‘Is it thus? Strong drink is an adder and subtractor, too. Is it the heat or the call of the wild that’s got you?’
“But High Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply. He stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach rules, and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes out and stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw. And I looks through a peekhole to see what he is up to.
“In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. Danged if I wasn’t knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked so exactly much like Florence Blue Feather. ‘I wonder,’ says I to myself, ‘if she has been reincarcerated, too? If I could see,’ says I to myself, ‘whether she has a mole on her left—” But the next minute I thought she looked one eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but she looked good at that. And High Jack hadn’t drunk all the rum that had been drank.
“The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then she went nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack’s feet. Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions. Even a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.
“And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the walls of the ruin. The girl gives a little jump backward, and her eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don’t beat.it.
“Why didn’t she? I’ll tell you why I think why. It don’t seem to a girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone god should come to life for her. If he was to do it for one of them snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would be different—but her! I’ll bet she said to herself: ‘Well, goodness me! you’ve been a long time getting on your job. I’ve half a mind not to speak to you.’
“But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple together. By the time I’d had time to take another drink and enter upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the woods that the girl had come down. With the natural scenery already in place, it was just like a play to watch ’em—she looking up at him, and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand out in the way of a goo-goo eye. But there wasn’t anything in the recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.
“ ‘Hey! Injun!’ I yells out to High Jack. ‘We’ve got a board-bill due in town, and you’re leaving me without a cent. Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let’s go back home.’
“But on the two goes without looking once back until, as you might say, the forest swallowed ‘em up. And I never saw or heard of High Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don’t know if the Cherokees came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of ’em went back.
“All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle Major Bing. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me a ticket home. And I’m back again on the job at Chubb‘s, sir, and I’m going to hold it steady. Come round, and you’ll find the steaks as good as ever.”
I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification and such mysteries as he had touched upon.
“Nothing like that,” said Hunky, positively. “What ailed High Jack was too much booze and education. They’ll do an Indian up every time.”
“But what about Miss Blue Feather?” I persisted.
“Say,” said Hunky, with a grin, “that little lady that stole High Jack certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago? Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through—and she’s been Mrs. Magee ever since.”
The Lotus and the Bottle
Willard Geddie, consul for the United States in Coralio, was working leisurely on his yearly report. Goodwin, who had strolled in as he did daily for a smoke on the much coveted porch, had found him so absorbed in his work that he departed after roundly abusing the consul for his lack of hospitality.
“I shall complain to the civil service department,” said Goodwin;—“or is it a department?—perhaps it’s only a theory. One gets neither civility nor service from you. You won’t talk; and you won’t set out anything to drink. What kind of a way is that of representing your government?”
Goodwin strolled out and across to the hotel to see if he could bully the quarantine doctor into a game on Coralio’s solitary billiard table. His plans were completed for the interception of the fugitives from the capital; and now it was but a waiting game that he had to play.
The consul was interested in his report. He was only twenty-four; and he had not been in Coralio long enough for his enthusiasm to cool in the heat of the tropics—a paradox that may be allowed between Cancer and Capricorn.
So many thousand bunches of bananas, so many thousand oranges and cocoanuts, so many ounces of gold dust, pounds of rubber, coffee, indigo and sarsaparilla—actually, exports were twenty per cent. greater than for the previous year!
A little thrill of satisfaction ran through the consul. Perhaps, he thought, the State Department, upon reading his introduction, would notice—and then he leaned back in his chair and laughed. He was getting as bad as the others. For the moment he had forgotten that Coralio was an insignificant town in an insignificant republic lying along the by-ways of a second-rate sea. He thought of Gregg, the quarantine doctor, who subscribed for the London Lancet, expecting to find it quoting his reports to the home Board of Health concerning the yellow fever germ. The consul knew that not one in fifty of his acquaintances in the States had ever heard of Coralio. He knew that two men, at any rate, would have to read his report—some underling in the State Department and a compositor in the Public Printing Office. Perhaps the typesticker would note the increase of commerce in Coralio, and speak of it, over the cheese and beer, to a friend.
He had just written: “Most unaccountable is the supineness of the large exporters in the United States in permitting the French and German houses to practically control the trade interests of this rich and productive country”—when he heard the hoarse notes of a steamer’s siren.
Geddie laid down his pen and gathered his Panama hat and umbrella. By the sound he knew it to be the Valhalla, one of the line of fruit vessels plying for the Vesuvius Company. Down to niños of five years, everyone in Coralio could name you each incoming steamer by the note of her siren.
The consul sauntered by a roundabout, shaded way to the beach. By reason of long practice he gauged his stroll so accurately that by the time he arrived on the sandy shore the boat of the customs officials was rowing back from the steamer, which had been boarded and inspected according to the laws of Anchuria.
There is no harbor at Coralio. Vessels of the draught of the Valhalla must ride at anchor a mile from
shore. When they take on fruit it is conveyed on lighters and freighter sloops. At Solitas, where there was a fine harbor, ships of many kinds were to be seen, but in the roadstead off Coralio scarcely any save the fruiters paused. Now and then a tramp coaster, or a mysterious brig from Spain, or a saucy French barque would hang innocently for a few days in the offing. Then the custom-house crew would become doubly vigilant and wary. At night a sloop or two would be making strange trips in and out along the shore; and in the morning the stock of Three-Star Hennessey, wines and drygoods in Coralio would be found vastly increased. It has also been said that the customs officials jingled more silver in the pockets of their red-striped trousers, and that the record books showed no increase in import duties received.
The customs boat and the Valhalla gig reached the shore at the same time. When they grounded in the shallow water there was still five yards of rolling surf between them and dry sand. Then half-clothed Caribs dashed into the water, and brought in on their backs the Valhalla’s purser and the native officials in their cotton undershirts, blue trousers with red stripes, and flapping straw hats.
At college Geddie had been a treasure as a first-baseman. He now closed his umbrella, stuck it upright in the sand, and stooped, with his hands resting upon his knees. The purser, burlesquing the pitcher’s contortions, hurled at the consul the heavy roll of newspapers, tied with a string, that the steamer always brought for him. Geddie leaped high and caught the roll with a sounding “thwack.” The loungers on the beach—about a third of the population of the town—laughed and applauded delightedly. Every week they expected to see that roll of papers delivered and received in that same manner, and they were never disappointed. Innovations did not flourish in Coralio.
The consul re-hoisted his umbrella and walked back to the consulate.
This home of a great nation’s representative was a wooden structure of two rooms, with a native-built gallery of poles, bamboo and nipa palm running on three sides of it. One room was the official apartment, furnished chastely with a flat-top desk, a hammock, and three uncomfortable cane-seated chairs. Engravings of the first and latest president of the country represented hung against the wall. The other room was the consul’s living apartment.