Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  “It’s right plausible of you, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson, “to take up the curmudgeons in your friend’s behalf; but it don’t alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady.”

  “Why, now, now, now!” says I. “Old Idaho do that! I could believe it of myself, sooner. I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and a blizzard was responsible for that. Once while we was snow-bound in the mountains he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven poetry, which may have corrupted his demeanour.”

  “It has,” says Mrs. Sampson. “Ever since I knew him he has been reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you judge by her poetry.”

  “Then Idaho has struck a new book,” says I, “for the one he had was by a man who writes under the /nom de plume/ of K. M.”

  “He’d better have stuck to it,” says Mrs. Sampson, “whatever it was. And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, and on ‘em is pinned a note. Now, Mr. Pratt, you know a lady when you see her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a moment that I’d skip out to the woods with a man along with a jug of wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down under the trees with him? I take a little claret with my meals, but I’m not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising Cain in any such style as that. And of course he’d bring his book of verses along, too. He said so. Let him go on his scandalous picnics alone! Or let him take his Ruby Ott with him. I reckon she wouldn’t kick unless it was on account of there being too much bread along. And what do you think of your gentleman friend now, Mr. Pratt?”

  “Well, ‘m,” says I, “it may be that Idaho’s invitation was a kind of poetry, and meant no harm. May be it belonged to the class of rhymes they call figurative. They offend law and order, but they get sent through the mails on the grounds that they mean something that they don’t say. I’d be glad on Idaho’s account if you’d overlook it,” says I, “and let us extricate our minds from the low regions of poetry to the higher planes of fact and fancy. On a beautiful afternoon like this, Mrs. Sampson,” I goes on, “we should let our thoughts dwell accordingly. Though it is warm here, we should remember that at the equator the line of perpetual frost is at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Between the latitudes of forty degrees and forty-nine degrees it is from four thousand to nine thousand feet.”

  “Oh, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson, “it’s such a comfort to hear you say them beautiful facts after getting such a jar from that minx of a Ruby’s poetry!”

  “Let us sit on this log at the roadside,” says I, “and forget the inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns of ascertained facts and legalised measures that beauty is to be found. In this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson,” says I, “is statistics more wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near Newcastle. A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet eight inches deep will hold one ton of coal. If an artery is cut, compress it above the wound. A man’s leg contains thirty bones. The Tower of London was burned in 1841.”

  “Go on, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson. “Them ideas is so original and soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be.”

  But it wasn’t till two weeks later that I got all that was coming to me out of Herkimer.

  One night I was waked up by folks hollering “Fire!” all around. I jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene. When I see it was Mrs. Sampson’s house, I gave forth a kind of yell, and I was there in two minutes.

  The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him the whole place was on fire down-stairs, and no man could go in it and come out alive.

  “Where’s Mrs. Sampson?” I asks.

  “She hasn’t been seen,” says one of the firemen. “She sleeps up- stairs. We’ve tried to get in, but we can’t, and our company hasn’t got any ladders yet.”

  I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Handbook out of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when I felt it in my hands — I reckon I was some daffy with the sensation of excitement.

  “Herky, old boy,” I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, “you ain’t ever lied to me yet, and you ain’t ever throwed me down at a scratch yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!” says I.

  I turned to “What to do in Case of Accidents,” on page 117. I run my finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never overlooked anything! It said:

  Suffocation from Inhaling Smoke or Gas. — There is nothing better than flaxseed. Place a few seed in the outer corner of the eye.

  I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was running by.

  “Here,” says I, giving him some money, “run to the drug store and bring a dollar’s worth of flaxseed. Hurry, and you’ll get another one for yourself. Now,” I sings out to the crowd, “we’ll have Mrs. Sampson!” And I throws away my coat and hat.

  Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me. It’s sure death, they say, to go in the house, for the floors was beginning to fall through.

  “How in blazes,” I sings out, kind of laughing yet, but not feeling like it, “do you expect me to put flaxseed in a eye without the eye?”

  I jabbed each elbow in a fireman’s face, kicked the bark off of one citizen’s shin, and tripped the other one with a side hold. And then I busted into the house. If I die first I’ll write you a letter and tell you if it’s any worse down there than the inside of that yellow house was; but don’t believe it yet. I was a heap more cooked than the hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants. The fire and smoke had me down on the floor twice, and was about to shame Herkimer, but the firemen helped me with their little stream of water, and I got to Mrs. Sampson’s room. She’d lost conscientiousness from the smoke, so I wrapped her in the bed clothes and got her on my shoulder. Well, the floors wasn’t as bad as they said, or I never could have done it — not by no means.

  I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the grass. Then, of course, every one of them other twenty-two plaintiff’s to the lady’s hand crowded around with tin dippers of water ready to save her. And up runs the boy with the flaxseed.

  I unwrapped the covers from Mrs. Sampson’s head. She opened her eyes and says:

  “Is that you, Mr. Pratt?”

  “S-s-sh,” says I. “Don’t talk till you’ve had the remedy.”

  I runs my arm around her neck and raises her head, gentle, and breaks the bag of flaxseed with the other hand; and as easy as I could I bends over and slips three or four of the seeds in the outer corner of her eye.

  Up gallops the village doc by this time, and snorts around, and grabs at Mrs. Sampson’s pulse, and wants to know what I mean by any such sandblasted nonsense.

  “Well, old Jalap and Jerusalem oakseed,” says I, “I’m no regular practitioner, but I’ll show you my authority, anyway.”

  They fetched my coat, and I gets out the Handbook.

  “Look on page 117,” says I, “at the remedy for suffocation by smoke or gas. Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says. I don’t know whether it works as a smoke consumer or whether it hikes the compound gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, and he was called to the case first. If you want to make it a consultation, there’s no objection.”

  Old doc takes the book and looks at it by means of his specs and a fireman’s lantern.

  “Well, Mr. Pratt,” says he, “you evidently got on the wrong line in reading your diagnosis. The recipe for suffocation says:
‘Get the patient into fresh air as quickly as possible, and place in a reclining position.’ The flaxseed remedy is for ‘Dust and Cinders in the Eye,’ on the line above. But, after all— “

  “See here,” interrupts Mrs. Sampson, “I reckon I’ve got something to say in this consultation. That flaxseed done me more good than anything I ever tried.” And then she raises up her head and lays it back on my arm again, and says: “Put some in the other eye, Sandy dear.”

  And so if you was to stop off at Rosa to-morrow, or any other day, you’d see a fine new yellow house with Mrs. Pratt, that was Mrs. Sampson, embellishing and adorning it. And if you was to step inside you’d see on the marble-top centre table in the parlour “Herkimer’s Handbook of Indispensable Information,” all rebound in red morocco, and ready to be consulted on any subject pertaining to human happiness and wisdom.

  THE PIMIENTA PANCAKES

  While we were rounding up a bunch of the Triangle-O cattle in the Frio bottoms a projecting branch of a dead mesquite caught my wooden stirrup and gave my ankle a wrench that laid me up in camp for a week.

  On the third day of my compulsory idleness I crawled out near the grub wagon, and reclined helpless under the conversational fire of Judson Odom, the camp cook. Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience.

  Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud’s obmutescence.

  Betimes I was stirred by invalid longings for something to eat that did not come under the caption of “grub.” I had visions of the maternal pantry “deep as first love, and wild with all regret,” and then I asked:

  “Jud, can you make pancakes?”

  Jud laid down his six-shooter, with which he was preparing to pound an antelope steak, and stood over me in what I felt to be a menacing attitude. He further endorsed my impression that his pose was resentful by fixing upon me with his light blue eyes a look of cold suspicion.

  “Say, you,” he said, with candid, though not excessive, choler, “did you mean that straight, or was you trying to throw the gaff into me? Some of the boys been telling you about me and that pancake racket?”

  “No, Jud,” I said, sincerely, “I meant it. It seems to me I’d swap my pony and saddle for a stack of buttered brown pancakes with some first crop, open kettle, New Orleans sweetening. Was there a story about pancakes?”

  Jud was mollified at once when he saw that I had not been dealing in allusions. He brought some mysterious bags and tin boxes from the grub wagon and set them in the shade of the hackberry where I lay reclined. I watched him as he began to arrange them leisurely and untie their many strings.

  “No, not a story,” said Jud, as he worked, “but just the logical disclosures in the case of me and that pink-eyed snoozer from Mired Mule Canada and Miss Willella Learight. I don’t mind telling you.

  “I was punching then for old Bill Toomey, on the San Miguel. One day I gets all ensnared up in aspirations for to eat some canned grub that hasn’t ever mooed or baaed or grunted or been in peck measures. So, I gets on my bronc and pushes the wind for Uncle Emsley Telfair’s store at the Pimienta Crossing on the Nueces.

  “About three in the afternoon I throwed my bridle rein over a mesquite limb and walked the last twenty yards into Uncle Emsley’s store. I got up on the counter and told Uncle Emsley that the signs pointed to the devastation of the fruit crop of the world. In a minute I had a bag of crackers and a long-handled spoon, with an open can each of apricots and pineapples and cherries and greengages beside of me with Uncle Emsley busy chopping away with the hatchet at the yellow clings. I was feeling like Adam before the apple stampede, and was digging my spurs into the side of the counter and working with my twenty-four-inch spoon when I happened to look out of the window into the yard of Uncle Emsley’s house, which was next to the store.

  “There was a girl standing there — an imported girl with fixings on — philandering with a croquet maul and amusing herself by watching my style of encouraging the fruit canning industry.

  “I slid off the counter and delivered up my shovel to Uncle Emsley.

  “‘That’s my niece,’ says he; ‘Miss Willella Learight, down from Palestine on a visit. Do you want that I should make you acquainted?’

  “‘The Holy Land,’ I says to myself, my thoughts milling some as I tried to run ‘em into the corral. ‘Why not? There was sure angels in Pales — Why, yes, Uncle Emsley,’ I says out loud, ‘I’d be awful edified to meet Miss Learight.’

  “So Uncle Emsley took me out in the yard and gave us each other’s entitlements.

  “I never was shy about women. I never could understand why some men who can break a mustang before breakfast and shave in the dark, get all left-handed and full of perspiration and excuses when they see a bold of calico draped around what belongs to it. Inside of eight minutes me and Miss Willella was aggravating the croquet balls around as amiable as second cousins. She gave me a dig about the quantity of canned fruit I had eaten, and I got back at her, flat-footed, about how a certain lady named Eve started the fruit trouble in the first free-grass pasture— ‘Over in Palestine, wasn’t it?’ says I, as easy and pat as roping a one-year-old.

  “That was how I acquired cordiality for the proximities of Miss Willella Learight; and the disposition grew larger as time passed. She was stopping at Pimienta Crossing for her health, which was very good, and for the climate, which was forty per cent. hotter than Palestine. I rode over to see her once every week for a while; and then I figured it out that if I doubled the number of trips I would see her twice as often.

  “One week I slipped in a third trip; and that’s where the pancakes and the pink-eyed snoozer busted into the game.

  “That evening, while I set on the counter with a peach and two damsons in my mouth, I asked Uncle Emsley how Miss Willella was.

  “‘Why,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘she’s gone riding with Jackson Bird, the sheep man from over at Mired Mule Canada.’

  “I swallowed the peach seed and the two damson seeds. I guess somebody held the counter by the bridle while I got off; and then I walked out straight ahead till I butted against the mesquite where my roan was tied.

  “‘She’s gone riding,’ I whisper in my bronc’s ear, ‘with Birdstone Jack, the hired mule from Sheep Man’s Canada. Did you get that, old Leather-and-Gallops?’

  “That bronc of mine wept, in his way. He’d been raised a cow pony and he didn’t care for snoozers.

  “I went back and said to Uncle Emsley: ‘Did you say a sheep man?’

  “‘I said a sheep man,’ says Uncle Emsley again. ‘You must have heard tell of Jackson Bird. He’s got eight sections of grazing and four thousand head of the finest Merinos south of the Arctic Circle.’

  “I went out and sat on the ground in the shade of the store and leaned against a prickly pear. I sifted sand into my boots with unthinking hands while I soliloquised a quantity about this bird with the Jackson plumage to his name.

  “I never had believed in harming sheep men. I see one, one day, reading a Latin grammar on hossback, and I never touched him! They never irritated me like they do most cowmen. You wouldn’t go to work now, and impair and disfigure snoozers, would you, that eat on tables and wear little shoes and speak to you on subjects? I had always let ‘em pass, just as you would a jack-rabbit; with a polite word and a guess about the weather, but no stopping to swap canteens. I never thought it was worth while to be hostile with a snoozer. And because I’d been lenient, and let ‘em live, here was one going around riding with Miss Willella Learight!

  “An hour by sun they come loping back, and stopped at Uncle Emsley’s gate. The sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each other sentences all sprightful and sagacious for a while. And then this feathered Jackson flies up in his saddle and raises his little stewpot of a hat, and trots off in the direction of his mutton ranch. By this time I had turned the sand out of my boots and unpinned myself
from the prickly pear; and by the time he gets half a mile out of Pimienta, I singlefoots up beside him on my bronc.

  “I said that snoozer was pink-eyed, but he wasn’t. His seeing arrangement was grey enough, but his eye-lashes was pink and his hair was sandy, and that gave you the idea. Sheep man? — he wasn’t more than a lamb man, anyhow — a little thing with his neck involved in a yellow silk handkerchief, and shoes tied up in bowknots.

  “‘Afternoon!’ says I to him. ‘You now ride with a equestrian who is commonly called Dead-Moral-Certainty Judson, on account of the way I shoot. When I want a stranger to know me I always introduce myself before the draw, for I never did like to shake hands with ghosts.’

  “‘Ah,’ says he, just like that— ‘Ah, I’m glad to know you, Mr. Judson. I’m Jackson Bird, from over at Mired Mule Ranch.’

  “Just then one of my eyes saw a roadrunner skipping down the hill with a young tarantula in his bill, and the other eye noticed a rabbit-hawk sitting on a dead limb in a water-elm. I popped over one after the other with my forty-five, just to show him. ‘Two out of three,’ says I. ‘Birds just naturally seem to draw my fire wherever I go.’

  “‘Nice shooting,’ says the sheep man, without a flutter. ‘But don’t you sometimes ever miss the third shot? Elegant fine rain that was last week for the young grass, Mr. Judson?’ says he.

  “‘Willie,’ says I, riding over close to his palfrey, ‘your infatuated parents may have denounced you by the name of Jackson, but you sure moulted into a twittering Willie — let us slough off this here analysis of rain and the elements, and get down to talk that is outside the vocabulary of parrots. That is a bad habit you have got of riding with young ladies over at Pimienta. I’ve known birds,’ says I, ‘to be served on toast for less than that. Miss Willella,’ says I, ‘don’t ever want any nest made out of sheep’s wool by a tomtit of the Jacksonian branch of ornithology. Now, are you going to quit, or do you wish for to gallop up against this Dead-Moral-Certainty attachment to my name, which is good for two hyphens and at least one set of funeral obsequies?’