by O. Henry
In due time, the fugitive and two of his friends appeared at the river, all armed to the teeth, and while awaiting the ferryboat, were visited by Ilall, who drew a bead upon them, and ordered them to throw down their arms. They refused, and a deadly encounter was imminent; but he finally awed them into submission, threatening to have the thief’s comrades arrested for carrying concealed weapons. They delivered up their revolvers and even their rifles, and lied, and the horse-thief, rather than risk a passage-at-arms with the redoubtable Hall, returned with him to Denison, after giving the valiant young constable some ugly wounds on the head with his fist. The passage of the river having thus been successfully disputed by the law, the rogues became somewhat more wary.
“Red Hall” seemed to bear a charmed life. He moved about tranquilly every day in a community where there were doubtless an hundred men who would have delighted to shed his blood; was often called to interfere in broils at all hours of the night; yet his life went on. He had been ambushed and shot at and threatened times innumerable, yet had always exhibited a scorn for his enemies, which finally ended in forcing them to admire him.
Red Hall was made Lieutenant of the Texas Rangers in April, 1877, and received his commission as Captain in the same year. Of his life in 1882 and of O. Henry’s association with him, Mrs. Lee Hall has k’ndly written a short sketch from which I am permitted to quote:
At the time Willie Porter was with us in Texas, Captain Hall had charge of the ranch in La Salle County belonging to the Dull Brothers, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had a contract with these gentlemen to buy the land, fence and stock it, and then operate the ranch as Superintendent. And it is this ranch and his life thereon that O. Henry has immortalized in many of his Texas stories. Captain Hall had to rid La Salle County of a notorious band of fence-cutting cattle thieves, and his famous result is chronicled in the Bexar County Courts of 1882. He finally succeeded in electing “Charlie” McKinney, a former member of his company of Rangers, as sheriff of La Salle County, and this officer proved himself most efficient and capable, securing peace to that community until his untimely death.
When we first went to the ranch, we occupied a small frame house of one room, about 12 x 8 feet in size. This room was sitting-room, bedroom, dining-room, etc., in fact the whole house. They then built a log house, about 12 x 35 feet, for Captain Hall and myself, and Mr. and Mrs. Dick Hall took possession of the log house, and it was here that Willie Porter first stayed with them.
We lived a most unsettled exciting existence. Captain Hail was in constant danger. His life was threatened in many ways, and the mail was heavy with warnings, generally in the shape of crude sketches, portraying effigies with ropes around the necks, and bearing the unfailing inscription “Your Necktie.” We usually travelled at night, nearly always with cocked guns. It was at this period of our life, during the struggle between the legitimate owners and the cattle thieves, that O. Henry saw something of the real desperado.
Willie Porter himself had a most charming but shy personality at this time. I remember him very distinctly and pleasantly. At the time he was 011 the ranch with us he was really living with Mr. and Mrs. Dick Hall, though he was a frequent visitor at our house. The intercourse between O. Henry and Captain Hall was more of a social than a business nature, though he acted as cowboy for a period under Captain Hall about the year 1882.
One does not have to read O. Henry’s Texas stories very closely to detect the presence of Red Hall. Whenever a Ranger officer is mentioned there is a striking absence of the strident, swash-buckling, blood-and- thunder characteristics that are popularly supposed to go with the members of the famous force, but there stands before us a calm and determined man who uses his pistol with instant precision but only as a last resort. This is the real type of the Ranger officer, dime novels to the contrary notwithstanding, and this is the type that O. Henry has portrayed. In “The Caballero’s Way,” Lieutenant Sandridge of the Rangers is described as “six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun.”
In “An Afternoon Miracle,” the conversation falls on Bob Buckley, another Ranger Lieutenant:
“I’ve heard of fellows,” grumbled Broncho Leathers, “what was wedded to danger, but if Bob Buckley ain’t committed bigamy with trouble, I’m a son of a gun.”
“Peculiarness of Bob is,” inserted the Nueces Kid, “he ain’t had proper trainin’. He never learned how to git skeered. Now a man ought to be skeered enough when he tackles a fuss to hanker after readin’ his name on the list of survivors, anyway.”
“Buckley,” commented Ranger No. 3, who was a misguided Eastern man, burdened with an education, “scraps in such a solemn manner that I have been led to doubt its spontaneity. I’m not quite onto his system, but he fights, like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic.”
“I never heard,” mentioned Broncho, “about any of Dibble’s ways of mixin’ scrappin’ and cipherin’.”
“Triggernometry?” suggested the Nueces infant.
“That’s rather better than I hoped from you,” nodded the Easterner, approvingly. “The other meaning is that Buckley never goes into a fight without giving away weight. He seems to dread taking the slightest advantage. That’s quite close to foolhardiness when you are dealing with horse-thieves and fence- cutters who would ambush you any night, and shoot you in the back if they could.”
O. Henry was to remain on the La Salle County ranch for two years. Both Mrs. Dick Hall and Mrs. Lee Hall were fond of books and, though their libraries were constantly augmented by visits to Austin and San Antonio, O. Henry more than kept pace with the increase. “His thirst for knowledge of all kinds,” says Mrs. Dick Hall, “was unquenchable. History, fiction, biography, science, and magazines of every description were devoured and were talked about with eager interest.” Tennyson became now his favourite poet and, as O. Henry’s readers would infer, remained so to the end. Webster’s “Unabridged Dictionary” was also a constant companion. He used it not merely as a reference book but as a source of ideas. It became to him in the isolation of ranch life what Herkimer’s “Handbook of Indispensable Information” had been to Sanderson Pratt and “The Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam to Idaho Green in “The Handbook of Hymen.” Mrs. Hall championed Worcester while O. Henry believed Worcester a back number and Webster the only up-to-date guide. The Webster- Worcester differences in spelling and pronunciation were at his tongue’s end and when he went to Austin he used to challenge the boys in the Harrell home to “stump” him on any point on which Webster had registered an opinion. “I carried Webster’s ‘Unabridged Dictionary’ around with me for two years,” he said, “while herding sheep for Dick Hall.”
There is more than humour in his review of Webster published in the Houston Daily Post:
We find on our table quite an exhaustive treatise on various subjects written in Mr. Webster’s well known, lucid, and piquant style. There is not a dull line between the covers of the book. The range of subjects is wide, and the treatment light and easy without being flippant. A valuable feature of the work is the arranging of the articles in alphabetical order, thus facilitating the finding of any particular word desired. Mr. Webster’s vocabulary is large, and he always uses the right word in the right place. Mr. Webster’s work is thorough, and we predict that he will be heard from again.
Dick Hall had been educated at Guilford College, a well-known Quaker school near Greensboro, and had learned French and Spanish from a Monsieur Maurice of the old Edgeworth Female Seminary. O. Henry began now the study of French and German but more persistently of Spanish. French and German were taken up as diversions but, as Mexican-Spanish was spoken all around him, he absorbed it as a part of his environment and in three months was the best speaker of it on the ranch. Not content with the “Greaser” dialect he bought a Spanish grammar and learned to read and speak Castilian Spanish. There is no evidence that he studied Latin after leaving Greensboro. The knowledge of it that he took with him was only that of a well-trained drug
clerk and enough of Caesar to enable him to misquote accurately.
He had not been long on the ranch before he received his cowboy initiation, “the puncher’s accolade.” The ritual varies but the treatment of Curly in “The Higher Abdication” typifies the general aim and method:
Three nights after that Curly rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep. Then the other punchers rose up softly and began to make preparations. Ranse saw Long Collins tie a rope to the horn of a saddle. Others were getting out their six- shooters.
“Boys,” said Ranse, “I’m much obliged. I was hoping you would. But I didn’t like to ask.”
Half a dozen six-shooters began to pop — awful yells rent the air — Long Collins galloped wildly across Curly’s bed, dragging the saddle after him. That was merely their way of gently awaking their victim. Then they hazed him for an hour, carefully and ridiculously, after the code of cow camps. Whenever he uttered protest they held him stretched over a roll of blankets and thrashed him woefully with a pair of leather leggings.
And all this meant that Curly had won his spurs, that he was receiving the puncher’s accolade. Nevermore would they be polite to him. But he would be their “pardner” and stirrup- brother, foot to foot.
But O. Henry was still the dreamer and onlooker rather than the active or regular participant in the cowboy disciplines. He learned or rather absorbed with little effort the art of lassoing cattle, of dipping and shearing sheep, of shooting accurately from the saddle, of tending and managing a horse. Even the cowboys conceded his premiership as a broncho-buster. He became also a skilled amateur cook, than which no other accomplishment was more serviceable on the La Salle County ranch. But he had no set or regular tasks. He lived with the Halls not as an employee but as one of the family. He rode regularly once a week to Fort Ewell fifteen miles away and occasionally to Cotulla which was forty miles from the ranch house. But his interest was mainly in the novelty of ranch life, in the contrast between it and the Greensboro life, in the strange types of character that he learned to know, and in the self-appointed task of putting what he saw into paragraphs or pictures which lie promptly destroyed.
This blend of close observation, avid reading, varied experience, and self-discipline in expression was an incomparable preparation for his future work. No occasional visitor on a ranch, no man who had not learned to hold the reins and the pen with equal mastery, could have described Raidler’s ride in “Hygeia at the Solito”:
If anything could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious McGuire to a sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvety wheels across an exhilarant savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a nimble, tireless trot, which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild, untrammelled gallop. The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they absorbed it, with the delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road perished, and the buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the grass itself, steered by the practised hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny distant mott of trees was a signboard, each convolution of the low hills a voucher of course and distance.
None but a sensitive nature, gifted but disciplined, could achieve a paragraph like this from “The Missing Chord”:
The ranch rested upon the summit of a lenient slope. The ambient prairie, diversified by arroyos and murky patches of brush and pear, lay around us like a darkened bowl at the bottom of which we reposed as dregs. Like a turquoise cover the sky pinned us there. The miraculous air, heady with ozone and made memorably sweet by leagues of wild flowerets, gave tang and savour to the breath. In the sky was a great, round, mellow searchlight which we knew to be no moon, but the dark lantern of summer, who came to hunt northward the cowering spring. In the nearest corral a flock of sheep lay silent until a groundless panic would send a squad of them huddling together with a drumming rush. For other sounds a shrill family of coyotes yapped beyond the shearing-pen, and whippoorwills twittered in the long grass. But even these dissonances hardly rippled the clear torrent of the mocking-birds’ notes that fell from a dozen neighbouring shrubs and trees. It would not have been preposterous for one to tiptoe and essay to touch the stars, they hung so bright and imminent.
An interesting impression of O. Henry at this time is given by Mr. Joe Dixon* who had written “Carbonate Days,” which he was later to destroy, and was looking around for some one to draw the pictures:
One day John Maddox came in and said: “See here, Joe — there is a young fellow here who came from North Carolina with Dick Hall, named Will Porter, who can draw like blazes. I believe he would be the very one to make the illustrations for your book. Dick Hall owns a sheep ranch out not very far from here, and Porter is working for him. Now, you might go out there and take the book along and tell him just about what you want, and let him have a crack at it.”
It looked like a pretty good idea to me, for it seemed to me that a man who had seen something of the same life might better be able to draw the pictures.
I found Porter to be a young, silent fellow, with deep, brooding, blue eyes, cynical for his years, and with a facile pen, later to be turned to word-painting instead of picture-drawing.
I would discuss the story with Will in the daytime, and at night he would draw the pictures. There were forty of them in all. And while crude, they were all good and true to the life they depicted.
The ranch was a vast chaparral plain, and for three weeks Porter worked on the illustrations, and he and I roamed about the place and talked together. We slept together in a rude little shack. I became much interested in the boy’s personality. He was a taciturn fellow, with a peculiar little hiss when amused, instead of the boyish laugh one might have expected, and he could give the queerest caustic turn to speech, getting off epigrams like little sharp bullets, every once in a while, and always unexpectedly.
One night Mrs. Hall said to me: “Do you know that that quiet boy is a wonderful writer? He slips in here every now and then and reads to me stories as fine as any Rider Haggard ever wrote.”
Mrs. Hall was a highly cultivated woman and her words deeply impressed me. After I had gained Will’s confidence he let me read a few of his stories, and I found them very fine.
“Will,” I said to him one day, “why don’t you try your hand at writing for the magazines?” But he had no confidence in himself, and destroyed his stories as fast as he wrote them.
“Well, at any rate,” I said, “try your hand at newspaper work.” But he couldn’t see it, and went on writing and destroying.
Only a few of O. Henry’s letters from the ranch to friends in Greensboro have been preserved. Most of these were written to Mrs. J. K. Hall, mother of Dick and Lee, and to Dr. W. P. Beall. Dr. Beall had recently moved to Greensboro from Lenoir, North Carolina, to practise medicine with Doctor Hall. He became a staunch friend of O. Henry and suggested to the Vesper Reading Club, of Lenoir, that they elect the young ranchman to honourary membership. Following are extracts from O. Henry’s letter of acknowledgment :
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Vesper Reading Club :
Some time ago I had the pleasure of receiving a letter from the secretary of your association which, on observing the strange postmark of Lenoir, I opened with fear and trembling, although I knew I didn’t owe anybody anything in that city. I began to peruse the document and found, first, that I had been elected an honourary member of that old and world-renowned body amidst thunders of applause that resounded far among the hills of Caldwell County, while the deafening cheers of the members were plainly heard above the din of the loafers in the grocery store. When I had somewhat recovered from the shock which such an unexpected honor must necessarily produce on a person of delicate sensibilities and modest ambition, I ventured to proceed and soon gathered that I was requested to employ my gigantic intellect in writing a letter to the club. I again picked myself up, brushed the dust off, and was disappointed not to find a notice of my nomination for governor of North Carolina.
The origin of the idea that I could write a letter of any interest to any one
is entirely unknown to me. The associations with which I have previously corresponded have been generally in the dry goods line and my letters for the most part of a conciliatory, pay-you-next-week tendency, which could hardly have procured me the high honors that your club has conferred upon me. But I will try and give you a truthful and correct account in a brief and condensed manner of some of the wonderful things to be seen and heard in this country. The information usually desired in such a case is in regard to people, climate, manners, customs, and general peculiarities.
The people of the State of Texas consist principally of men, women, and children, with a sprinkling of cowboys. The weather is very good, thermometer rarely rising above 2,500 degrees in the shade and hardly ever below 212. There is a very pleasant little phase in the weather which is called a “norther” by the natives, which endears the country very much to the stranger who experiences it. You are riding along on a boiling day in September, dressed as airily as etiquette will allow, watching the fish trying to climb out of the pools of boiling water along the way and wondering how long it would take to walk home with a pocket compass and 75 cents in Mexican money, when a wind as cold as the icy hand of death swoops down on you from the north and the “norther” is upon you.
Where do you go? If you are far from home it depends entirely upon what kind of life you have led previous to this time as to where you go. Some people go straight to heaven while others experience a change of temperature by the transition. “Northers” are very useful in killing off the surplus population in some degree, while the remainder die naturally and peacefully in their boots.
After a long imaginary interview with a citizen of Texas whose picture was enclosed but has been lost, the letter ends: