The Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  "Sorry to see you back again," said the young man, turning to speak to him. "I hoped you had struck something better than this."

  "Me?" said Thomas. "Oh, I just took a run around the block to keep warm! I see the public ain't lending to the Lord very fast to- night."

  "In this kind of weather," said the young man, "charity avails itself of the proverb, and both begins and ends at home."

  And the Preacher and his vehement lieutenant struck up a last hymn of petition to Providence and man. Those of the Bed Liners whose windpipes still registered above 32 degrees hopelessly and tunelessly joined in.

  In the middle of the second verse Thomas saw a sturdy girl with wind-tossed drapery battling against the breeze and coming straight toward him from the opposite sidewalk. "Annie!" he yelled, and ran toward her.

  "You fool, you fool!" she cried, weeping and laughing, and hanging upon his neck, "why did you do it?"

  "The Stuff," explained Thomas briefly. "You know. But subsequently nit. Not a drop." He led her to the curb. "How did you happen to see me?"

  "I came to find you," said Annie, holding tight to his sleeve. "Oh, you big fool! Professor Cherubusco told us that we might find you here."

  "Professor Ch-- Dont' know the guy. What saloon does he work in?"

  "He's a clairvoyant, Thomas; the greatest in the world. He found you with the Chaldean telescope, he said."

  "He's a liar," said Thomas. "I never had it. He never saw me have anybody's telescope."

  "And he said you came in a chariot with five wheels or something."

  "Annie," said Thoms solicitously, "you're giving me the wheels now. If I had a chariot I'd have gone to bed in it long ago. And without any singing and preaching for a nightcap, either."

  "Listen, you big fool. The Missis says she'll take you back. I begged her to. But you must behave. And you can go up to the house to-night; and your old room over the stable is ready."

  "Great!" said Thomas earnestly. "You are It, Annie. But when did these stunts happen?"

  "To-night at Professor Cherubusco's. He sent his automobile for the Missis, and she took me along. I've been there with her before."

  "What's the professor's line?"

  "He's a clairvoyant and a witch. The Missis consults him. He knows everything. But he hasn't done the Missis any good yet, though she's paid him hundreds of dollars. But he told us that the stars told him we could find you here."

  "What's the old lady want this cherry-buster to do?"

  "That's a family secret," said Annie. "And now you've asked enough questions. Come on home, you big fool."

  They had moved but a little way up the street when Thomas stopped.

  "Got any dough with you, Annie?" he asked.

  Annie looked at him sharply.

  "Oh, I know what that look means," said Thomas. "You're wrong. Not another drop. But there's a guy that was standing next to me in the bed line over there that's in bad shape. He's the right kind, and he's got wives or kids or something, and he's on the sick list. No booze. If you could dig up half a dollar for him so he could get a decent bed I'd like it."

  Annie's fingers began to wiggle in her purse.

  "Sure, I've got money," said she. "Lots of it. Twelve dollars." And then she added, with woman's ineradicable suspicion of vicarious benevolence: "Bring him here and let me see him first."

  Thomas went on his mission. The wan Bed Liner came readily enough. As the two drew near, Annie looked up from her purse and screamed:

  "Mr. Walter-- Oh--Mr. Walter!:

  "Is that you, Annie?" said the young man meekly.

  "Oh, Mr. Walter!--and the Missis hunting high and low for you!"

  "Does mother want to see me?" he asked, with a flush coming out on his pale cheek.

  "She's been hunting for you high and low. Sure, she wants to see you. She wants you to come home. She's tried police and morgues and lawyers and advertising and detectives and rewards and everything. And then she took up clearvoyants. You'll go right home, won't you, Mr. Walter?"

  "Gladly, if she wants me," said the young man. "Three years is a long time. I suppose I'll have to walk up, though, unless the street cars are giving free rides. I used to walk and beat that old plug team of bays we used to drive to the carriage. Have they got them yet?"

  "They have," said Thomas, feelingly. "And they'll have 'em ten years from now. The life of the royal elephantibus truckhorseibus is one hundred and forty-nine years. I'm the coachman. Just got my reappointment five minutes ago. Let's all ride up in a surface car--that is--er--if Annie will pay the fares."

  On the Broadway car Annie handed each one of the prodigals a nickel to pay the conductor.

  "Seems to me you are mighty reckless the way you throw large sums of money around," said Thomas sarcastically.

  "In that purse," said Annie decidedly, "is exactly $11.85. I shall take every cent of it to-morrow and give it to professor Cherubusco, the greatest man in the world."

  "Well," said Thomas, "I guess he must be a pretty fly guy to pipe off things the way he does. I'm glad his spooks told him where you could find me. If you'll give me his address, some day I'll go up there, myself, and shake his hand."

  Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully felt an abrasion or two on his knees and his elbows.

  "Say, Annie," said he confidentially, maybe it's one of the last dreams of booze, but I've a kind of a recollection of riding in authomobile with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down the front steps. If it was the d.t's, why am I so sore?"

  "Shut up, you fool," said Annie.

  "If I could find that funny guy's house, said Thomas, in conclusion, "I'd go up there some day and punch his nose for him."

  THE POET AND THE PEASANT

  The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor.

  It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.

  When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment:

  "Too artificial."

  Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls.

  And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a well- arrived writer of fiction--a man who had trod on asphalt all his life, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains.

  Conant wrote a poem and called it "The Doe and the Brook." It was a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who had strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist's windows, and whose sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.

  But this has very little to do with the story.

  Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowly up Forty-second Street.

  The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and hair the exact color of the little orphan's (afterward discovered to be the earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise--description of it is an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay--the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men.

  Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the raw stranger st
and in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what Coney "attraction" or brand of chewing gum he might be thus dinning into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the newsboys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street cars.

  At Eighth Avenue stood "Bunco Harry," with his dyed mustache and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman, who had stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window, and shook his head.

  "Too thick, pal," he said, critically--"too thick by a couple of inches. I don't know what your lay is; but you've got the properties too thick. That hay, now--why, they don't even allow that on Proctor's circuit any more."

  "I don't understand you, mister," said the green one. "I'm not lookin' for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to look at the town, bein' that the hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's a whopper. I thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here town is five times as big."

  "Oh, well," said "Bunco Harry," raising his eyebrows, "I didn't mean to butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow."

  "I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer," acknowledged the other.

  They went to a caf'e frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks.

  "I'm glad I come across you, mister," said Haylocks. "How'd you like to play a game or two of seven-up? I've got the keerds."

  He fished them out of Noah's valise--a rare, inimitable deck, greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.

  "Bunco Harry" laughed loud and briefly.

  "Not for me, sport," he said, firmly. "I don't go against that make- up of yours for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The Reubs haven't dressed like that since '79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that layout."

  "Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money," boasted Haylocks. He drew forth a tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup, and laid it on the table.

  "Got that for my share of grandmother's farm," he announced. "There's $950 in that roll. Thought I'd come to the city and look around for a likely business to go into."

  "Bunco Harry" took up the roll of money and looked at it with almost respect in his smiling eyes.

  "I've seen worse," he said, critically. "But you'll never do it in them clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw hat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work off phony stuff like that."

  "What's his line?" asked two or three shifty-eyed men of "Bunco Harry" after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and departed.

  "The queer, I guess," said Harry. "Or else he's one of Jerome's men. Or some guy with a new graft. He's too much hayseed. Maybe that his--I wonder now--oh, no, it couldn't have been real money."

  Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he dived into a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At first sight of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and exaggerated rusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary suspicion.

  Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.

  "Keep that a while for me, mister," he said, chewing at the end of a virulent claybank cigar. "I'll be back after I knock around a spell. And keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside of it, though maybe you wouldn't think so to look at me."

  Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back.

  "Divvy, Mike," said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at one another.

  "Honest, now," said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. "You don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't no jay. One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made himself up. There ain't no parts of the country now where they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he's got nine-fifty in that valise it's a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that's stopped at ten minutes to ten."

  When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the "gags" that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shellgame man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.

  Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.

  "Son," said he, "run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm mighty nigh out of chicken feed. I guess you'll get a nickel if you'll hurry up."

  A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face.

  "Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself. Dey ain't no farm clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer stage money."

  On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He was Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.

  "Mister," said the rural one. "I've heard of places in this here town where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10? I'm goin' to have some sport, and then maybe I'll buy out a business of some kind."

  The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left forefinger nail.

  "Cheese it, old man," he murmured, reproachfully. "The Central Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. You couldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace."

  Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detect artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented his thoughts to hold a conference.

  "It's my clothes," said he; "durned if it ain't. They think I'm a hayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never made fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you in New York you must dress up like they do."

  So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over the buldge in his inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.

  At 9 o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom Ulster County would have foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat the latest block. His light gray trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant English walking coat. His collar might have graced a laundry window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.

  For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the easy and graceful tread of a millionaire.

  But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in the city had enveloped him in their
field of vision. A stout man with gray eyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows from the row of loungers in front of the hotel.

  "The juiciest jay I've seen in six months," said the man with gray eyes. "Come along."

  It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty- seventh Street Police Station with the story of his wrongs.

  "Nine hundred and fifty dollars," he gasped, "all my share of grandmother's farm."

  The desk seargeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of Locust Valley farm, Ulster County, and then bagan to take descriptions of the strong-arm gentlemen.

  When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he was received over the head of the office boy into the inner office that is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.