Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  “‘Boss,’ says he. ‘Doc Hoskins am done gone twenty miles in de country to see some sick persons. He’s de only doctor in de town, and Massa Banks am powerful bad off. He sent me to ax you to please, suh, come.’

  “‘As man to man,’ says I, ‘I’ll go and look him over.’ So I put a bottle of Resurrection Bitters in my pocket and goes up on the hill to the mayor’s mansion, the finest house in town, with a mansard roof and two cast iron dogs on the lawn.

  “This Mayor Banks was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bed holding a cup of water.

  “‘Doc,’ says the Mayor, ‘I’m awful sick. I’m about to die. Can’t you do nothing for me?’

  “‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘I’m not a regular preordained disciple of S. Q. Lapius. I never took a course in a medical college,’ says I. ‘I’ve just come as a fellow man to see if I could be off assistance.’

  “‘I’m deeply obliged,’ says he. ‘Doc Waugh-hoo, this is my nephew, Mr. Biddle. He has tried to alleviate my distress, but without success. Oh, Lordy! Ow-ow-ow!!’ he sings out.

  “I nods at Mr. Biddle and sets down by the bed and feels the mayor’s pulse. ‘Let me see your liver — your tongue, I mean,’ says I. Then I turns up the lids of his eyes and looks close that the pupils of ‘em.

  “‘How long have you been sick?’ I asked.

  “‘I was taken down — ow-ouch — last night,’ says the Mayor. ‘Gimme something for it, doc, won’t you?’

  “‘Mr. Fiddle,’ says I, ‘raise the window shade a bit, will you?’

  “‘Biddle,’ says the young man. ‘Do you feel like you could eat some ham and eggs, Uncle James?’

  “‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade and listening, ‘you’ve got a bad attack of super-inflammation of the right clavicle of the harpsichord!’

  “‘Good Lord!’ says he, with a groan, ‘Can’t you rub something on it, or set it or anything?’

  “I picks up my hat and starts for the door.

  “‘You ain’t going, doc?’ says the Mayor with a howl. ‘You ain’t going away and leave me to die with this — superfluity of the clapboards, are you?’

  “‘Common humanity, Dr. Whoa-ha,’ says Mr. Biddle, ‘ought to prevent your deserting a fellow-human in distress.’

  “‘Dr. Waugh-hoo, when you get through plowing,’ says I. And then I walks back to the bed and throws back my long hair.

  “‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘there is only one hope for you. Drugs will do you no good. But there is another power higher yet, although drugs are high enough,’ says I.

  “‘And what is that?’ says he.

  “‘Scientific demonstrations,’ says I. ‘The triumph of mind over sarsaparilla. The belief that there is no pain and sickness except what is produced when we ain’t feeling well. Declare yourself in arrears. Demonstrate.’

  “‘What is this paraphernalia you speak of, Doc?’ says the Mayor. ‘You ain’t a Socialist, are you?’

  “‘I am speaking,’ says I, ‘of the great doctrine of psychic financiering — of the enlightened school of long-distance, sub-conscientious treatment of fallacies and meningitis — of that wonderful in-door sport known as personal magnetism.’

  “‘Can you work it, doc?’ asks the Mayor.

  “‘I’m one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,’ says I. ‘The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a pass at ‘em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control. It was only through me at the recent seances at Ann Arbor that the late president of the Vinegar Bitters Company could revisit the earth to communicate with his sister Jane. You see me peddling medicine on the street,’ says I, ‘to the poor. I don’t practice personal magnetism on them. I do not drag it in the dust,’ says I, ‘because they haven’t got the dust.’

  “‘Will you treat my case?’ asks the Mayor.

  “‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I’ve had a good deal of trouble with medical societies everywhere I’ve been. I don’t practice medicine. But, to save your life, I’ll give you the psychic treatment if you’ll agree as mayor not to push the license question.’

  “‘Of course I will,’ says he. ‘And now get to work, doc, for them pains are coming on again.’

  “‘My fee will be $250.00, cure guaranteed in two treatments,’ says I.

  “‘All right,’ says the Mayor. ‘I’ll pay it. I guess my life’s worth that much.’

  “I sat down by the bed and looked him straight in the eye.

  “‘Now,’ says I, ‘get your mind off the disease. You ain’t sick. You haven’t got a heart or a clavicle or a funny bone or brains or anything. You haven’t got any pain. Declare error. Now you feel the pain that you didn’t have leaving, don’t you?’

  “‘I do feel some little better, doc,’ says the Mayor, ‘darned if I don’t. Now state a few lies about my not having this swelling in my left side, and I think I could be propped up and have some sausage and buckwheat cakes.’

  “I made a few passes with my hands.

  “‘Now,’ says I, ‘the inflammation’s gone. The right lobe of the perihelion has subsided. You’re getting sleepy. You can’t hold your eyes open any longer. For the present the disease is checked. Now, you are asleep.’

  “The Mayor shut his eyes slowly and began to snore.

  “‘You observe, Mr. Tiddle,’ says I, ‘the wonders of modern science.’

  “‘Biddle,’ says he, ‘When will you give uncle the rest of the treatment, Dr. Pooh-pooh?’

  “‘Waugh-hoo,’ says I. ‘I’ll come back at eleven to-morrow. When he wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.’

  “The next morning I was back on time. ‘Well, Mr. Riddle,’ says I, when he opened the bedroom door, ‘and how is uncle this morning?’

  “‘He seems much better,’ says the young man.

  “The mayor’s color and pulse was fine. I gave him another treatment, and he said the last of the pain left him.

  “‘Now,’ says I, ‘you’d better stay in bed for a day or two, and you’ll be all right. It’s a good thing I happened to be in Fisher Hill, Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘for all the remedies in the cornucopia that the regular schools of medicine use couldn’t have saved you. And now that error has flew and pain proved a perjurer, let’s allude to a cheerfuller subject — say the fee of $250. No checks, please, I hate to write my name on the back of a check almost as bad as I do on the front.’

  “‘I’ve got the cash here,’ says the mayor, pulling a pocket book from under his pillow.

  “He counts out five fifty-dollar notes and holds ‘em in his hand.

  “‘Bring the receipt,’ he says to Biddle.

  “I signed the receipt and the mayor handed me the money. I put it in my inside pocket careful.

  “‘Now do your duty, officer,’ says the mayor, grinning much unlike a sick man.

  “Mr. Biddle lays his hand on my arm.

  “‘You’re under arrest, Dr. Waugh-hoo, alias Peters,’ says he, ‘for practising medicine without authority under the State law.’

  “‘Who are you?’ I asks.

  “‘I’ll tell you who he is,’ says Mr. Mayor, sitting up in bed. ‘He’s a detective employed by the State Medical Society. He’s been following you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch you. I guess you won’t do any more doctoring around these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was it you said I had, doc?’ the mayor laughs, ‘compound — well, it wasn’t softening of the brain, I guess, anyway.’

  “‘A detective,’ says I.

  “‘Correct,’ says Biddle. ‘I’ll have to turn you over to the sheriff.’

  “‘Let’s see you do it,’ says I, and I grabs Biddle by the throat and half throws him out the window, but he pulls a gun and sticks it under my chin, and I stand still. Then he puts handcu
ffs on me, and takes the money out of my pocket.

  “And I grabs Biddle by the throat.”

  “‘I witness,’ says he, ‘that they’re the same bank bills that you and I marked, Judge Banks. I’ll turn them over to the sheriff when we get to his office, and he’ll send you a receipt. They’ll have to be used as evidence in the case.’

  “‘All right, Mr. Biddle,’ says the mayor. ‘And now, Doc Waugh-hoo,’ he goes on, ‘why don’t you demonstrate? Can’t you pull the cork out of your magnetism with your teeth and hocus-pocus them handcuffs off?’

  “‘Come on, officer,’ says I, dignified. ‘I may as well make the best of it.’ And then I turns to old Banks and rattles my chains.

  “‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘the time will come soon when you’ll believe that personal magnetism is a success. And you’ll be sure that it succeeded in this case, too.’

  “And I guess it did.

  “When we got nearly to the gate, I says: ‘We might meet somebody now, Andy. I reckon you better take ‘em off, and— ‘ Hey? Why, of course it was Andy Tucker. That was his scheme; and that’s how we got the capital to go into business together.”

  MODERN RURAL SPORTS

  Jeff Peters must be reminded. Whenever he is called upon, pointedly, for a story, he will maintain that his life has been as devoid of incident as the longest of Trollope’s novels. But lured, he will divulge. Therefore I cast many and divers flies upon the current of his thoughts before I feel a nibble.

  “I notice,” said I, “that the Western farmers, in spite of their prosperity, are running after their old populistic idols again.”

  “It’s the running season,” said Jeff, “for farmers, shad, maple trees and the Connemaugh river. I know something about farmers. I thought I struck one once that had got out of the rut; but Andy Tucker proved to me I was mistaken. ‘Once a farmer, always a sucker,’ said Andy. ‘He’s the man that’s shoved into the front row among bullets, ballots and the ballet. He’s the funny-bone and gristle of the country,’ said Andy, ‘and I don’t know who we would do without him.’

  “One morning me and Andy wakes up with sixty-eight cents between us in a yellow pine hotel on the edge of the pre-digested hoe-cake belt of Southern Indiana. How we got off the train there the night before I can’t tell you; for she went through the village so fast that what looked like a saloon to us through the car window turned out to be a composite view of a drug store and a water tank two blocks apart. Why we got off at the first station we could, belongs to a little oroide gold watch and Alaska diamond deal we failed to pull off the day before, over the Kentucky line.

  “When I woke up I heard roosters crowing, and smelt something like the fumes of nitro-muriatic acid, and heard something heavy fall on the floor below us, and a man swearing.

  “‘Cheer up, Andy,’ says I. ‘We’re in a rural community. Somebody has just tested a gold brick downstairs. We’ll go out and get what’s coming to us from a farmer; and then yoicks! and away.’

  “Farmers was always a kind of reserve fund to me. Whenever I was in hard luck I’d go to the crossroads, hook a finger in a farmer’s suspender, recite the prospectus of my swindle in a mechanical kind of a way, look over what he had, give him back his keys, whetstone and papers that was of no value except to owner, and stroll away without asking any questions. Farmers are not fair game to me as high up in our business as me and Andy was; but there was times when we found ‘em useful, just as Wall Street does the Secretary of the Treasury now and then.

  “When we went down stairs we saw we was in the midst of the finest farming section we ever see. About two miles away on a hill was a big white house in a grove surrounded by a wide-spread agricultural agglomeration of fields and barns and pastures and out-houses.

  “‘Whose house is that?’ we asked the landlord.

  “‘That,’ says he, ‘is the domicile and the arboreal, terrestrial and horticultural accessories of Farmer Ezra Plunkett, one of our county’s most progressive citizens.’

  “After breakfast me and Andy, with eight cents capital left, casts the horoscope of the rural potentate.

  “‘Let me go alone,’ says I. ‘Two of us against one farmer would look as one-sided as Roosevelt using both hands to kill a grizzly.’

  “‘All right,’ says Andy. ‘I like to be a true sport even when I’m only collecting rebates from the rutabag raisers. What bait are you going to use for this Ezra thing?’ Andy asks me.

  “‘Oh,’ I says, ‘the first thing that come to hand in the suit case. I reckon I’ll take along some of the new income tax receipts, and the recipe for making clover honey out of clabber and apple peelings; and the order blanks for the McGuffey’s readers, which afterwards turn out to be McCormick’s reapers; and the pearl necklace found on the train; and a pocket-size goldbrick; and a— ‘

  “‘That’ll be enough,’ says Andy. ‘Any one of the lot ought to land on Ezra. And say, Jeff, make that succotash fancier give you nice, clean, new bills. It’s a disgrace to our Department of Agriculture, Civil Service and Pure Food Law the kind of stuff some of these farmers hand out to use. I’ve had to take rolls from ‘em that looked like bundles of microbe cultures captured out of a Red Cross ambulance.’

  “So, I goes to a livery stable and hires a buggy on my looks. I drove out to the Plunkett farm and hitched. There was a man sitting on the front steps of the house. He had on a white flannel suit, a diamond ring, golf cap and a pink ascot tie. ‘Summer boarder,’ says I to myself.

  “‘I’d like to see Farmer Ezra Plunkett,’ says I to him.

  “‘You see him,’ says he. ‘What seems to be on your mind?’

  “I never answered a word. I stood still, repeating to myself the rollicking lines of that merry jingle, ‘The Man with the Hoe.’ When I looked at this farmer, the little devices I had in my pocket for buncoing the pushed-back brows seemed as hopeless as trying to shake down the Beef Trust with a mittimus and a parlor rifle.

  “‘Well,’ says he, looking at me close, ‘speak up. I see the left pocket of your coat sags a good deal. Out with the goldbrick first. I’m rather more interested in the bricks than I am in the trick sixty-day notes and the lost silver mine story.’

  “I had a kind of cerebral sensation of foolishness in my ideas of ratiocination; but I pulled out the little brick and unwrapped my handkerchief off it.

  “‘One dollar and eighty cents,’ says the farmer hefting it in his hand. ‘Is it a trade?’

  “‘The lead in it is worth more than that,’ says I, dignified. I put it back in my pocket.

  “‘All right,’ says he. ‘But I sort of wanted it for the collection I’m starting. I got a $5,000 one last week for $2.10.’

  “Just then a telephone bell rings in the house.

  “‘Come in, Bunk,’ says the farmer, ‘and look at my place. It’s kind of lonesome here sometimes. I think that’s New York calling.’

  “We went inside. The room looked like a Broadway stockbroker’s — light oak desks, two ‘phones, Spanish leather upholstered chairs and couches, oil paintings in gilt frames a foot deep and a ticker hitting off the news in one corner.

  “‘Hello, hello!’ says this funny farmer. ‘Is that the Regent Theatre? Yes; this is Plunkett, of Woodbine Centre. Reserve four orchestra seats for Friday evening — my usual ones. Yes; Friday — good-bye.’

  “‘I run over to New York every two weeks to see a show,’ says the farmer, hanging up the receiver. ‘I catch the eighteen-hour flyer at Indianapolis, spend ten hours in the heyday of night on the Yappian Way, and get home in time to see the chickens go to roost forty-eight hours later. Oh, the pristine Hubbard squasherino of the cave-dwelling period is getting geared up some for the annual meeting of the Don’t-Blow-Out-the-Gas Association, don’t you think, Mr. Bunk?’

  “‘I seem to perceive,’ says I, ‘a kind of hiatus in the agrarian traditions in which heretofore, I have reposed confidence.’

  “‘Sure, Bunk,’ says he. ‘The yellow primrose on the river�
��s brim is getting to look to us Reubs like a holiday edition de luxe of the Language of Flowers with deckle edges and frontispiece.’

  “Just then the telephone calls him again.

  “‘Hello, hello!’ says he. ‘Oh, that’s Perkins, at Milldale. I told you $800 was too much for that horse. Have you got him there? Good. Let me see him. Get away from the transmitter. Now make him trot in a circle. Faster. Yes, I can hear him. Keep on — faster yet. … That’ll do. Now lead him up to the phone. Closer. Get his nose nearer. There. Now wait. No; I don’t want that horse. What? No; not at any price. He interferes; and he’s windbroken. Goodbye.’

  “‘Now, Bunk,’ says the farmer, ‘do you begin to realize that agriculture has had a hair cut? You belong in a bygone era. Why, Tom Lawson himself knows better than to try to catch an up-to-date agriculturalist napping. It’s Saturday, the Fourteenth, on the farm, you bet. Now, look here, and see how we keep up with the day’s doings.’

  “He shows me a machine on a table with two things for your ears like the penny-in-the-slot affairs. I puts it on and listens. A female voice starts up reading headlines of murders, accidents and other political casualities.

  “‘What you hear,’ says the farmer, ‘is a synopsis of to-day’s news in the New York, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco papers. It is wired in to our Rural News Bureau and served hot to subscribers. On this table you see the principal dailies and weeklies of the country. Also a special service of advance sheets of the monthly magazines.’

  “I picks up one sheet and sees that it’s headed: ‘Special Advance Proofs. In July, 1909, the Century will say’ — and so forth.

  “The farmer rings up somebody — his manager, I reckon — and tells him to let that herd of 15 Jerseys go at $600 a head; and to sow the 900-acre field in wheat; and to have 200 extra cans ready at the station for the milk trolley car. Then he passes the Henry Clays and sets out a bottle of green chartreuse, and goes over and looks at the ticker tape.

  “‘Consolidated Gas up two points,’ says he. ‘Oh, very well.’