O. Henry

by O. Henry

  Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and, then, why no one should ever do it.

  In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage. That is, of course, supposing that they are old-­timers with the necessary experience and courage. They have the outside and are protected by the darkness, while the others are in the light, hemmed into a small space, and exposed, the moment they show a head at a window or door, to the aim of a man who is a dead shot and who won’t hesitate to shoot.

  But, in my opinion, the main condition that makes train robbing easy is the element of surprise in connection with the imagination of the passengers. If you have ever seen a horse that has eaten loco weed you will understand what I mean when I say that the passengers get locoed. That horse gets the awfullest imagination on him in the world. You can’t coax him to cross a little branch stream two feet wide. It looks as big to him as the Mississippi River. That’s just the way with the passenger. He thinks there are a hundred men yelling and shooting outside, when maybe there are only two or three. And the muzzle of a forty-­five looks like the entrance to a tunnel. The passenger is all right, although he may do mean little tricks, like hiding a wad of money in his shoe and forgetting to dig-­up until you jostle his ribs some with the end of your six-­shooter; but there’s no harm in him.

  As to the train crew, we never had any more trouble with them than if they had been so many sheep. I don’t mean that they are cowards; I mean that they have got sense. They know they’re not up against a bluff. It’s the same way with the officers. I’ve seen secret service men, marshals, and railroad detectives fork over their change as meek as Moses. I saw one of the bravest marshals I ever knew hide his gun under his seat and dig up along with the rest while I was taking toll. He wasn’t afraid; he simply knew that we had the drop on the whole outfit. Besides, many of those officers have families and they feel that they oughtn’t to take chances; whereas death has no terrors for the man who holds up a train. He expects to get killed some day, and he generally does. My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold-­up, is to line up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you. Another reason why officers are backward about mixing things with a train robber is a financial one. Every time there is a scrimmage and somebody gets killed, the officers lose money. If the train robber gets away they swear out a warrant against John Doe et al. and travel hundreds of miles and sign vouchers for thousands on the trail of the fugitives, and the Government foots the bills. So, with them, it is a question of mileage rather than courage.

  I will give one instance to support my statement that the surprise is the best card in playing for a hold-­up.

  Along in ’92 the Daltons were cutting out a hot trail for the officers down in the Cherokee Nation. Those were their lucky days, and they got so reckless and sandy, that they used to announce before hand what job they were going to undertake. Once they gave it out that they were going to hold up the M. K. & T. flyer on a certain night at the station of Pryor Creek, in Indian Territory.

  That night the railroad company got fifteen deputy marshals in Muscogee and put them on the train. Beside them they had fifty armed men hid in the depot at Pryor Creek.

  When the Katy Flyer pulled in not a Dalton showed up. The next station was Adair, six miles away. When the train reached there, and the deputies were having a good time explaining what they would have done to the Dalton gang if they had turned up, all at once it sounded like an army firing outside. The conductor and brakeman came running into the car yelling, “Train robbers!”

  Some of those deputies lit out of the door, hit the ground, and kept on running. Some of them hid their Winchesters under the seats. Two of them made a fight and were both killed.

  It took the Daltons just ten minutes to capture the train and whip the escort. In twenty minutes more they robbed the express car of twenty-­seven thousand dollars and made a clean get-­away.

  My opinion is that those deputies would have put up a stiff fight at Pryor Creek, where they were expecting trouble, but they were taken by surprise and “locoed” at Adair, just as the Daltons, who knew their business, expected they would.

  I don’t think I ought to close without giving some deductions from my experience of eight years “on the dodge.” It doesn’t pay to rob trains. Leaving out the question of right and morals, which I don’t think I ought to tackle, there is very little to envy in the life of an outlaw. After a while money ceases to have any value in his eyes. He gets to looking upon the railroads and express companies as his bankers, and his six-­shooter as a cheque book good for any amount. He throws away money right and left. Most of the time he is on the jump, riding day and night, and he lives so hard between times that he doesn’t enjoy the taste of high life when he gets it. He knows that his time is bound to come to lose his life or liberty, and that the accuracy of his aim, the speed of his horse, and the fidelity of his “sider,” are all that postpone the inevitable.

  It isn’t that he loses any sleep over danger from the officers of the law. In all my experience I never knew officers to attack a band of outlaws unless they outnumbered them at least three to one.

  But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind—and that is what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else—he knows where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they gained their positions and immunity by turning state’s evidence, by turning traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. He knows that some day—unless he is shot first—his Judas will set to work, the trap will be laid, and he will be the surprised instead of a surpriser at a stick-­up.

  That is why the man who holds up trains picks his company with a thousand times the care with which a careful girl chooses a sweetheart. That is why he raises himself from his blanket of nights and listens to the tread of every horse’s hoofs on the distant road. That is why he broods suspiciously for days upon a jesting remark or an unusual movement of a tried comrade, or the broken mutterings of his closest friend, sleeping by his side.

  And it is one of the reasons why the train-­robbing profession is not so pleasant a one as either of its collateral branches—­politics or cornering the market.

  The Ransom of Mack

  * * *

  ME AND old Mack Lonsbury, we got out of that Little Hide-­and-­Seek gold mine affair with about $40,000 apiece. I say “old” Mack; but he wasn’t old. Forty-­one, I should say; but he always seemed old.

  “Andy,” he says to me, “I’m tired of hustling. You and me have been working hard together for three years. Say we knock off for a while, and spend some of this idle money we’ve coaxed our way.”

  “The proposition hits me just right,” says I. “Let’s be nabobs a while and see how it feels. What’ll we do—take in the Niagara Falls, or buck at faro?”

  “For a good many years,” says Mack, “I’ve thought that if I ever had extravagant money I’d rent a two-­room cabin somewhere, hire a Chinaman to cook, and sit in my stocking feet and read Buckle’s History of Civilisation.”

  “That sounds self-­indulgent and gratifying without vulgar ostentation,” says I; “and I don’t see how money could be better invested. Give me a cuckoo clock and a Sep Winner’s Self-­Instructor for the Banjo, and I’ll join you.”

  A week afterward me and Mack hits this small town of Piña, about thirty miles out from Denver, and finds an elegant two-­room house that just suits us. We deposited half-­a-­peck of money in the Piña bank and shook hands with every one of the 340 citizens in the town. We brought along the Chinaman and the cuckoo clock and Buckle and the Instructor with us from Denver; and they made the cabin seem like home at once.

  Never believe it when they tell you riches don’t bring happiness. If you could have
seen old Mack sitting in his rocking-­chair with his blue-­yarn sock feet up in the window and absorbing in that Buckle stuff through his specs you’d have seen a picture of content that would have made Rockefeller jealous. And I was learning to pick out “Old Zip Coon” on the banjo, and the cuckoo was on time with his remarks, and Ah Sing was messing up the atmosphere with the handsomest smell of ham and eggs that ever laid the honeysuckle in the shade. When it got too dark to make out Buckle’s nonsense and the notes in the Instructor, me and Mack would light our pipes and talk about science and pearl diving and sciatica and Egypt and spelling and fish and trade-­winds and leather and gratitude and eagles, and a lot of subjects that we’d never had time to explain our sentiments about before.

  One evening Mack spoke up and asked me if I was much apprised in the habits and policies of women folks.

  “Why, yes,” says I, in a tone of voice; “I know ’em from Alfred to Omaha. The feminine nature and similitude,” says I, “is as plain to my sight as the Rocky Mountains is to a blue-­eyed burro. I’m onto all their little side-­steps and punctual discrepancies.”

  “I tell you, Andy,” says Mack, with a kind of sigh, “I never had the least amount of intersection with their predispositions. Maybe I might have had a proneness in respect to their vicinity, but I never took the time. I made my own living since I was fourteen; and I never seemed to get my ratiocinations equipped with the sentiments usually depicted toward the sect. I sometimes wish I had,” says old Mack.

  “They’re an adverse study,” says I, “and adapted to points of view. Although they vary in rationale, I have found ’em quite often obviously differing from each other in divergences of contrast.”

  “It seems to me,” goes on Mack, “that a man had better take ’em in and secure his inspirations of the sect when he’s young and so preordained. I let my chance go by; and I guess I’m too old now to go hopping into the curriculum.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I tells him. “Maybe you better credit yourself with a barrel of money and a lot of emancipation from a quantity of uncontent. Still, I don’t regret my knowledge of ’em,” I says. “It takes a man who understands the symptoms and by-­plays of women-­folks to take care of himself in this world.”

  We stayed on in Piña because we liked the place. Some folks might enjoy their money with noise and rapture and locomotion; but me and Mack we had had plenty of turmoils and hotel towels. The people were friendly; Ah Sing got the swing of the grub we liked; Mack and Buckle were as thick as two body-­snatchers, and I was hitting out a cordial resemblance to “Buffalo Gals, Can’t You Come Out To-­night,” on the banjo.

  One day I got a telegram from Speight, the man that was working a mine I had an interest in out in New Mexico. I had to go out there; and I was gone two months. I was anxious to get back to Piña and enjoy life once more.

  When I struck the cabin I nearly fainted. Mack was standing in the door; and if angels ever wept, I saw no reason why they should be smiling then.

  That man was a spectacle. Yes; he was worse; he was a spyglass; he was the great telescope in the Lick Observatory. He had on a coat and shiny shoes and a white vest and a high silk hat; and a geranium as big as an order of spinach was spiked onto his front. And he was smirking and warping his face like an infernal storekeeper or a kid with colic.

  “Hello, Andy,” says Mack, out of his face. “Glad to see you back. Things have happened since you went away.”

  “I know it,” says I, “and a sacrilegious sight it is. God never made you that way, Mack Lonsbury. Why do you scarify His works with this presumptious kind of ribaldry?”

  “Why, Andy,” says he, “they’ve elected me justice of the peace since you left.”

  I looked at Mack close. He was restless and inspired. A justice of the peace ought to be diconsolate and assuaged.

  Just then a young woman passed on the sidewalk; and I saw Mack kind of half snicker and blush, and then he raised up his hat and smiled and bowed, and she smiled and bowed, and went on by.

  “No hope for you,” says I, “if you’ve got the Mary-­Jane infirmity at your age. I thought it wasn’t going to take on you. And patent leather shoes! All this in two little short months!”

  “I’m going to marry the young lady who just passed to-­night,” says Mack, in a kind of a flutter.

  “I forgot something at the post-­office,” says I, and walked away quick.

  I overtook that young woman a hundred yards away. I raised my hat and told her my name. She was about nineteen; and young for her age. She blushed, and then looked at me cool, like I was the snow scene from the “Two Orphans.”

  “I understand you are to be married to-­night,” I said.

  “Correct,” says she. “You got any objections?”

  “Listen, sissy,” I begins.

  “My name is Miss Rebosa Redd,” says she in a pained way.

  “I know it,” says I. “Now, Rebosa, I’m old enough to have owed money to your father. And that old, specious, dressed-­up, garbled, sea-­sick ptomaine prancing around avidiously like an irremediable turkey gobbler with patent leather shoes on is my best friend. Why did you go and get him invested in this marriage business?”

  “Why, he was the only chance there was,” answers Miss Rebosa.

  “Nay,” says I, giving a sickening look of admiration at her complexion and style of features; “with your beauty you might pick any kind of a man. Listen, Rebosa. Old Mack ain’t the man you want. He was twenty-­two when you was née Reed, as the papers say. This bursting into bloom won’t last with him. He’s all ventilated with oldness and rectitude and decay. Old Mack’s down with a case of Indian summer. He overlooked his bet when he was young; and now he’s suing Nature for the interest on the promissory note he took from Cupid instead of the cash. Rebosa, are you bent on having this marriage occur?”

  “Why, sure I am,” says she, oscillating the pansies on her hat, “and so is somebody else, I reckon.”

  “What time is it to take place?” I asks.

  “At six o’clock,” says she.

  I made up my mind right away what to do. I’d save old Mack if I could. To have a good, seasoned, ineligible man like that turn chicken for a girl that hadn’t quit eating slate pencils and buttoning in the back was more than I could look on with easiness.

  “Rebosa,” says I, earnest, drawing upon my display of knowledge concerning the feminine intuitions of reason—“ain’t there a young man in Piña—a nice young man that you think a heap of?”

  “Yep,” says Rebosa, nodding her pansies—“Sure there is! What do you think! Gracious!”

  “Does he like you?” I asks. “How does he stand in the matter?”

  “Crazy,” says Rebosa. “Ma has to wet down the front steps to keep him from sitting there all the time. But I guess that’ll be all over after to-­night,” she winds up with a sigh.

  “Rebosa,” says I, “you don’t really experience any of this adoration called love for old Mack, do you?”

  “Lord! no,” says the girl, shaking her head. “I think he’s as dry as a lava bed. The idea!”

  “Who is this young man that you like, Rebosa?” I inquires.

  “It’s Eddie Bayles,” says she. “He clerks in Crosby’s grocery. But he don’t make but thirty-­five a month. Ella Noakes was wild about him once.”

  “Old Mack tells me,” I says, “that he’s going to marry you at six o’clock this evening.”

  “That’s the time,” says she. “It’s to be at our house.”

  “Rebosa,” says I, “listen to me. If Eddie Bayles had a thousand dollars cash—a thousand dollars, mind you, would buy him a store of his own—if you and Eddie had that much to excuse matrimony on, would you consent to marry him this evening at five o’clock?”

  The girl looks at me a minute; and I can see these inaudible cogitations going on inside of her, as women will
.

  “A thousand dollars?” says she. “Of course I would.”

  “Come on,” says I. “We’ll go and see Eddie.”

  We went up to Crosby’s store and called Eddie outside. He looked to be estimable and freckled; and he had chills and fever when I made my proposition.

  “At five o’clock?” says he, “for a thousand dollars? Please don’t wake me up! Well, you are the rich uncle retired from the spice business in India! I’ll buy out old Crosby and run the store myself.”

  We went inside and got old man Crosby apart and explained it. I wrote my check for a thousand dollars and handed it to him. If Eddie and Rebosa married each other at five he was to turn the money over to them.

  And then I gave ’em my blessing, and went to wander in the wildwood for a season. I sat on a log and made cogitations on life and old age and the zodiac and the ways of women and all the disorder that goes with a lifetime. I passed myself congratulations that I had probably saved my old friend Mack from his attack of Indian summer. I knew when he got well of it and shed his infatuation and his patent leather shoes, he would feel grateful. “To keep old Mack disinvolved,” thinks I, “from relapses like this, is worth more than a thousand dollars.” And most of all I was glad that I’d made a study of women, and wasn’t to be deceived any by their means of conceit and evolution.