by O. Henry
“Joyce, you’re a noble fellow. Nothing could be fairer. Shall we call this evening?”
“The sooner, the better,” I said. His prompt acquiescence puzzled me, but I was filled with delirious joy at the prospect of meeting her. Now that we were both at an understanding of each other’s sentiments toward the woman we adored, and were taking no unfair advantage of our friendly relations, I felt my old amity for Curley return. He had acted with greater magnanimity than I would have shown, I told myself. We parted with effusive amiability.
I was two hours making my toilet that evening. I am not a bad looking man, and I was quite satisfied with my appearance in the mirror. Curley was to call for me at my rooms at eight, and take me to call upon her. Noble fellow! Would I have done the same by him? I tried to make myself believe so.
Curley was on hand promptly at the hour agreed upon. He was magnificently dressed, and I knew it was to be a battle to the death. We went down the stairs, and Curley turned slightly toward the left, with me close at his side. The evening was chilly, and we buttoned our Inverness overcoats up high.
We walked steadily down the street not conversing much, for I was full of happy anticipation of soon being in the presence of the woman I longed to meet.
We came to a quarter of the city built up with handsome residences, and I began to exercise my fancy by selecting this and that house for Her abode, but Curley went straight on, turning neither to the right or the left, and keeping pace with my stride.
Soon the houses began to grow further apart, and less pretentious in appearance, and still Curley kept straight ahead. After we had walked fully half an hour the street turned to a mere lane, the dwellings to mean and tumbledown cottages, and still Curley pressed forward upon a straight course.
I thought She must be in very humble circumstances, and thought how happily I would work for her if it should be my great fortune to win her favor.
Presently Curley tumbled into a ditch, and I helped him out, and began to scrape the mud off him. There were old fields on either side of us, a few squalid looking tenement houses, and the high black walls of factories and warehouses looming against the sky. A queer place for Zenobia to live, truly.
“Confound it,” said Curley, “I’ve ruined my coat.”
“Is it much further?” I asked.
“Dont you know where she lives?” said he.
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’ve never been to her house. I’ve only seen her at other places.”
“Then, how,” he said, “How the devil did you expect to find it?”
“I—I was going with you,” I said, rather weakly.
“What do you mean?” said Curley, “by asking me to call upon a young lady with you, and leading me into this villainous ditch, and then asking me where she lives?”
“I expected you to know,” I said. “I was following you. Dont you know?”
“Of course not,” he answered; “I never met her. You proposed—”
“Wait a moment,” I said, “Whom did you think we were going to call upon?”
“Why, the young lady, the original of the illustrations you drew for my book. Did’nt you pro—”
“Wait another minute. Who was the original of Zenobia in your book?”
“Purely an imaginary character. And your pictures were drawn from—”
“Fancy.”
We spoke very little of Ideals on the way back.
The Miracle of Lava Canyon
* * *
THE SHERIFF of Siskiwah county, Ari. had a secret. He never told it to his best friend, but it was never out of his own mind. He was a physical coward. A shot fired set his heart beating wildly, and he turned sick at strife and carnage. His pulse beats averaged 95 per minute and his heart turned cold every time a summons for arrest was placed in his hands. He experienced a sensation of nervous dread each time he swung himself upon the back of his high-spirited horse. Every sudden sound conveying presage of danger thrilled him with fright. His disposition was high-strung, sensitive and unalterably timid. And yet “Rad” Conrad was known as the coolest and most courageous sheriff in this territory. He had attained this reputation by a daily and hourly struggle with his whole moral force against his natural weakness. His fear of danger, great as it was, had been subordinated to a greater fear lest his failing be known. How to hide his cowardice from the world was his one aim. With a cold fear in his heart he sought danger with the eagerness of one who loved its every phase. Quiet, persistent, plodding in his way; without any of the western dash and audacity belonging to most men in his occupation, he continually sought the closest risks and hazards, driven by an abnormal desire to appear fearless. Men who had no conception of the meaning of the word “fear” sometimes stood apart, aghast at the man’s daring, and admired him. Apparently without the slightest excitement, almost sullen of aspect, he trailed desperate criminals to their rendezvous, engaged in combat against mighty odds and waged such relentless war upon desperadoes and outlaws that his fame as an upholder of law and order was spread far and wide.
Radcliff Conrad kept his secret well. Not a man in Siskiwah county has ever seen him flinch from his duty, and tales were told in saloons and camps of his intrepidity and recklessness.
The sheriff ’s personal appearance aided him. He was strongly and finely formed. He possessed a blond head of classic mold, and a steel-blue eye under good control. His inward struggles kept him at a tension that gave him a reserved and somewhat preoccupied manner, and his every action seemed the result of deliberation instead of impulse. The giving away to impulse was the thing he was trying to avoid. He felt that some day his moral courage would fail him, and he would stand stripped to the gaze of his friends, the coward that he knew himself to be. No monkish ascetic ever scourged his fleshly sins as Radcliff Conrad did his one egregious failing. How well he succeeded in triumphing over it, his fame in Lava canyon and, indeed, in the mouths of men as far as the sage brush grew to east and west attested.
There came one cruel day when the sheriff was forced to apply the whip to his tortured spirit with double force. The town of Lava Canyon was built on a stretch of plain sloping down to a river from the exit of a mountain gulch. Within this gulch was a tangled wilderness. Two miles back from the town it converged to a fissure half a mile deep, like a sword-cut cleaving the hills. The sides, for its whole extent, were inaccessible, except to the rattlesnakes that made their dens among the boulders. Within the edge of the gulch, where the densely wooded sides began to straighten to steeper angles, stood the white painted cottage of Emmet Reed, the postmaster, and leading dealer in hardware, cutlery, arms and ammunition. Here, beside the mountain stream and among the moss-grown rocks, played the juvenile Reeds—little more than rushes in size—watched over more or less carefully by Boadicea, aged 20, eldest daughter of the house.
To these confines late one afternoon came Arizona Dan, worst man in the county, after breaking $500 worth of mirrors and glassware in the principal places of entertainment and introducing sundry slugs of lead into various citizens, to their great bodily anguish. Dan was not too drunk to entertain a wholesome fear of Rad Conrad, and it was his intention to conceal himself until darkness should lend him cover to escape.
On being apprised of these events the sheriff of the county, recognizing his duty, prepared to effect Dan’s capture. A brave man in his place who properly estimated the value of a good citizen’s life in comparison with the vital spark of a degenerate like Arizona Dan, as a furtherance of the survival of the fittest idea, would have summoned a posse and by moral force of numbers would have secured the surrender of the offender without risk of bloodshed. Radcliff Conrad was not the man to do this. He shunned all appearance of lack of courage, as he desired, in his heart, to shun the danger.
“What arms did he have?” asked the sheriff of some men who had seen Arizona Dan’s retreat to the gulch.
“Nary a one,” said a saloon keeper, who had suffered from the fugitive’s iconoclasm. “He left both his guns in my place.”
The sheriff unbuckled his revolver and shoved it across the counter.
“Keep that for me,” he said. “I’ll go and get Dan.”
He passed slowly down the street, walking in the direction of the gulch, and the men gazed after him admiringly.
“Never knew what bein’ afraid was. Rad never!” said the mail carrier.
“He ’uz born that a-way,” said the county clerk. “A man as ain’t got no skeer in him don’t deserve no credit fur havin’ sand. He wouldn’t take his gun along, ’cause Dan had left his’n. With a creetur like Dan it ’pears to me that’s a leetle reckless. Dan overweights Rad a matter of twenty-five pounds, the very least.”
In the gulch things were as usual, to all appearances. The little mountain brook that dashed down the steep rocks purled in the deep shade and sent out diamond flashes where stray flecks of sunlight dived into it and the birds in the redwood trees whistled away as though there was no such unharmonious and degraded thing as Arizona Dan somewhere below, trying to conceal his desecrating presence. The little Reeds were at school and such noises as might have been heard by that legendary and overworked creature, the casual observer, were sylvan and well attuned. A critic in sight-harmony would also have found little to cavil at, unless his too fine-drawn perceptions had deemed the aspect of Miss Boadicea Reed, who sat negligently in a grapevine swing, too unsylph-like for perfect accord.
Miss Boadicea—called “Dicey” by her immediate family and friends, a diminutive evolved from their original and arbitrary pronunciation of her name—sounded a note which may have been a dissonance, but it had its true power of accentuating the soft melody of the wood. As she half reclined upon the giant vine, her freshly starched white muslin crackled about a form whose measurements faltered not an inch from the modern standard of perfection. Her glossy, black hair was arranged in the latest fashion shown in the most recently arrived ladies’ magazine in Lava Canyon. Her features were clear cut and regular; she had the eyes of Melpomene and the heart of the ancient British queen whose name she bore.
Miss Boadicea Reed also had a secret. Being a woman, her dearest friends had often heard it divulged. But, as it was a secret, there needs must be those to whom it was not imparted. That portion of humanity was the one denominated by Miss Reed as “the gentlemen.” This awful secret was that she had never, no never, felt the slightest sensation of fear or abashment at any person or thing since she could remember. Miss Boadicea despised and contemned all the little feminine weaknesses and terrors of her sex with all the prejudice of one who did not understand them. Had she been born with time and circumstances in her favor she would have led the overturning of a dynasty or two, captured by force the crown of some social queendom, or at least have gone up in a balloon as the special female representative of one of the several greatest newspapers on earth. Snakes, dogs, spiders, gossip, lightning, men—the partial list of the things regarded by Miss Reed with a serenity approaching contumely will afford a slight conception of her intrepidity of spirit. In the presence of man, the lord of creation, she felt no awe. Living in a frontier mining town and possessing the attractions she did, offers of marriage had come years before, but her suitors had never awakened in her a feeling softer than comradeship. She had laughed at most of them, pitched one out the window, and informed them all that they “made her tired.” In fact, there was nothing in all creation, with or without life, that had ever caused her a qualm or a tremor. She regarded robbers as vulgar persons beneath notice, serpents, horned toads, mice and Gila monsters as uninteresting and unterrifying vermin too insignificant to dread. Her secret ambition, cherished in good faith until she was 18, had been to dress in man’s clothes and travel round the world selling soap, or diamonds, or patent quartz crushers—anything would do. Since she was 20 her ideas had toned down to a firm resolve to be prima donna of an opera troupe, and the gulch had for many months echoed daily warblings that for clearness and volume, if not melodiousness, surpassed easily any vice in Lava canon. The form within the crinkling white muslin was a storage battery of impetuous life and force that needed continually some object upon which to exhaust its energy.
As Boadicea swung in the grape vine, some 300 yards up the gulch from the house, she turned her gaze idly toward a thick clump of bushes, and saw an eye with a good deal of red in the normally white portion of it looking at her between the leaves.
She sat bolt upright on the vine, and, as it appeared to be a man’s eye, her hand, without any special volition of her brain, went to the knot of hair at the back of her head, smoothed it a little and thrust in the pins more securely.
“Come out of there,” she said.
Red-faced and heavy-eyed from drink, Arizona Dan, hitching up his revolverless belt, shuffled his huge form through the flexible branches of the bushes into the path.
“Sh-sh-sh!” he said, his heavy face folding into a dull smile intended to be reassuring. “I ain’t a-goin’ to hurt you, miss.”
“Hurt me,” said Miss Reed, contemptuously. “I should think not. What are you doing here?”
“Just a-layin’ low, miss, and waitin’ for night. Yer see, I was on what you might call a sort of spree and broke a glass or two. Maybe somebody was hurt, too. The whisky done it. A good lookin’ young lady like you, miss, wouldn’t give the word on a man, now, I bet a hoss.”
Arizona Dan’s lumbering attempt at compliment produced no effect. Boadicea regarded him sternly with unswerving, disapproving eyes.
“You don’t want to be loafing around these diggings,” she said, substituting the local form of parlance for her ordinarily more elevated style of conversation, as being more worthy of her audience. “You are not afraid, are you?” with infinite disdain.
“I ain’t afraid,” said Arizona Dan, shifting his feet uneasily, “except of being took. I can’t fight the whole town.”
“Is any one after you?”
“If they ain’t, they will be. Rad Conrad’s in town and—”
Arizona Dan broke off with an oath and looked down the steep pathway. “Here he comes now,” he muttered.
Boadicea rose to her feet and peered over the tops of the intervening bushes. The sheriff, unarmed, in a light summer suit that set off to advantage his strong, graceful figure, was coming up the path with the sun striking golden lights from his head of curly blonde hair. Boadicea looked upon him and loved.
When in ten paces of his man the sheriff took off his hat and wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief.
“Dan,” he said, in an even tone, “I want you.”
Arizona Dan drew a nine-inch bowie knife from the leg of his boot. “Come and get me,” he said, with a grin and a suggestive upward movement of his right hand.
The old, well known, nauseating, deathly, cowardly physical fear came upon the sheriff as he saw the shining blade held by the huge desperado he had come unarmed to capture. His pride and the wonderful moral puissance that ground out courageous deeds from heart-sinking apprehension urged him forward with another step. Arizona Dan laughed a low, half-sober, but chilling laugh. So quiet it was that the voice of the brook sounded in the sheriff ’s ears like the derisive mockery of men at his poltroonry.
For one instant Radcliff Conrad swung in the balance. An all-pervading panic seized him and the foot he lifted to take a forward step weighed 100 pounds. The rustling of a branch to his right above the path drew from him a swift glance and he looked for ten seconds into two dark eyes that seemed to flash some strange, exalting essence into his veins. A weight seemed loosened somewhere within him and he felt that he could hear it fall down, down to unsounded depths. He looked at Arizona Dan and laughed low and joyously, as a child does who has come upon a long-desired toy.
“Will you come?” said the sheriff in a tone a b
ridegroom might have used to his bride.
“I’ll cut your heart out, Rad Conrad,” said Arizona Dan, “if you come two steps nearer.”
Boadicea, on the ledge above, rustled a little and the sheriff, without looking up, smiled again. Arizona Dan held his knife as one holds a foil, point outward, with his thumb against the guard. The sheriff crouched some three inches like a cat and seemed to gather himself together with his weight balanced evenly on each foot. Arizona Dan stood still with his knife ready. Was Rad Conrad fool enough to attack him with his bare hands?
The sheriff could have shouted for joy. Like a flash valor and audacious courage had come upon him. He felt that he would never know fear again. Something had passed into his blood that had made him a man instead of the spurious being he had been. He felt the two dark eyes above fixed upon him, but he kept his own upon Arizona Dan.
Heretofore the sheriff ’s exploits had been attended by a fortuitous chance that brought him safely out of them—a chance just as blind and incomprehensible as that which guards the ways of children and drunkards. Now he felt the caution, the indomitable intent to do coupled with the prudence of the successful general that gives bravery its value. Half a miracle had been accomplished. The other half was to follow.
It must have been that Arizona Dan’s nerves were unstrung by his debauch, else when a small stone dislodged by Boadicea’s foot rattled down to the path at his side he would not have bestowed the advantage of turning his head quickly to look. But he did so, and in the instant the sheriff had his knife arm by the wrist, and his other arm about his waist. Then Arizona Dan was filled with surprise to feel the arm that held his knife slowly twisting in spite of all his resistance—twisting outward, until the tendons and muscles were cracking. The sheriff ’s hand was like a steel clamp, and when the pain grew unbearable Arizona Dan dropped the knife. When the sheriff heard it ring on the rocks he released the wrist suddenly and laid his left forearm across Dan’s throat. They were too close for blows, and there was little struggling or shifting of ground. The arm across Dan’s throat pushed his head back, and the other iron band about his waist held him close. It was a silent, fierce, straining contention on one side for the displacement, and on the other to regain the center of gravity. The side for displacement won, and the gladiators went down with a crash. A small boulder in the way of Arizona Dan’s head left him lying in a disgraceful heap oblivious to defeat. The sheriff knelt upon the vanquished distributor of leaden largess, drew cords from his pocket, and ignominiously bound him hand and foot. Then he sprang to his feet and turned his flushed face and yellow curls to the source of his new being, as a sunflower turns to the sun.