Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  “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 statute 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, but 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 Cæsar. 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 peep-holes 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 plantains and cassava, 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 I. ‘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 punctured the near-horizon, and me and High 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 fibre 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 bare-footed 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 of 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 café — 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 peek-hole 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 that 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 MOMENT OF VICTORY

  Ben Granger is a war veteran aged twenty-nine — which should enable you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of Cadiz, a little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico perpetually blow.

  Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal’s guard of cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been for deeds rather than for words; but the consideration and digestion of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will attest.

  “What is it,” he asked me one moonlit eve, as we sat among his boxes and barrels, “that generally makes men go through dangers, and fire, and trouble, and starvation, and battle, and such recourses? What does a man do it for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow-humans, and be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best friends are? What’s his game? What does he expect to get out of it? He don’t do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice versa places of the world?”

  “Well, Ben,” said I, with judicial seriousness, “I think we might safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three — to ambition, which is a desire for popular applause; to avarice, which looks to the material side of success; and to love of some woman whom he either possesses or desires to possess.”

  Ben pondered over my words while a mocking-bird on the top of a mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars.

  “I reckon,” said he, “that your diagnosis about covers the case according to the rules laid down in the copy-books and historical readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a person I used to know. I’ll tell you about him before I close up the store, if you don’t mind listening.

  “Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine. I was clerking there then for Brady & Murchison, wholesale dry-goods and ranch supplies. Willie and I belonged to the same german club and athletic association and military company. He played the triangle in our serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the welkin three nights a week somewhere in town.

  “Willie jibed with his name considerable. He weighed about as much as a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a ‘Where-is-Mary?’ expression on his features so plain that you could almost see the wool growing on him.

  “And yet you couldn’t fence him away from the girls with barbed wire. You know that kind of young fellows — a kind of a mixture of fools and angels — they rush in and fear to tread at the same time; but they never fail to tread when they get the chance. He was always on hand when ‘a joyful occasion was had,’ as the morning paper would say, looking as happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw oyster served with sweet pickles. He danced like he had hind hobbles on; and he had a vocabulary of about three hundred and fifty words that he made stretch over four germans a week, and plagiarized from to get him through two ice-cream suppers and a Sunday-night call. He seemed to me to be a sort of a mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive plant, and a member of a stranded ‘Two Orphans’ company.

  “I’ll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial make-up, and then I’ll stick spurs into the sides of my narrative.

  “Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his coloring and manner of style. His hair was opalescent and his conversation fragmentary. His eyes were the same blue shade as the china dog’s on the right-hand corner of your Aunt Ellen’s mantelpiece. He took things as they came, and I never felt any hostility against him. I let him live, and so did others.

  “But what does this Willie do but coax his heart out of his boots and lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest, and prettiest girl in San Augustine. I tell you, she had the blackest eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing — Oh, no, you’re off — I wasn’t a victim. I might have been, but I knew better. I kept out. Joe Granberry was It from the start. He had everybody else beat a couple of leagues and thence east to a stake and mound. But, anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound, full-merino, fall-clip fleece, sacked and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone.

  “One night there was an ice-cream sociable at Mrs. Colonel Spraggins’, in San Augustine. We fellows had a big room up-stairs opened up for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweat-bands of our hats — in short, a room to fix up in just like they have everywhere at high-toned doings. A little farther down the hall was the girls’ room, which they used to powder up in, and so forth. Downstairs we — that is, the San Augustine Social Cotillion and Merrymakers’ Club — had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our dance was going on.

  “Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our — cloak-room, I believe we called it — when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way down-stairs from the girls’ room. Willie was standing before the mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blond grass-p
lot on his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was always full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in our door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe Granberry stood with her. So did Willie; but he kept on ba-a-a-ing after her and following her around. He had a system of persistence that didn’t coincide with pale hair and light eyes.

  “‘Hello, Willie!’ says Myra. ‘What are you doing to yourself in the glass?’

  “‘I’m trying to look fly,’ says Willie.

  “‘Well, you never could be fly,’ says Myra, with her special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.

  “I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of a lily-white look on him which seemed to show that her remark had, as you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man’s ideas of self-consciousness; but he was set back to an extent you could scarcely imagine.

  “After we went down-stairs with our clean collars on, Willie never went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a diluted kind of a skim-milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe Granberry beat him out.

  “The next day the battleship Maine was blown up, and then pretty soon somebody — I reckon it was Joe Bailey, or Ben Tillman, or maybe the Government — declared war against Spain.

  “Well, everybody south of Mason & Hamlin’s line knew that the North by itself couldn’t whip a whole country the size of Spain. So the Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the call. ‘We’re coming, Father William, a hundred thousand strong — and then some,’ was the way they sang it. And the old party lines drawn by Sherman’s march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one undivided. country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West, and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new eight-dollar suit-case.