Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  But I must bring this hurried letter to a close. I have already written far into the night. The moon is low and the wind is still. The lovely stars, the “forget-me-nots of the angels,” which have blossomed all night in the infinite meadows of heaven, unheeded and unseen by us poor sleepy mortals for whom they spread their shining petals and silvery beams in vain, are twinkling above in all their beauty and mystery. The lonely cry of the coyote is heard mingling with the noise of a piece of strong Texas bacon trying to get out of the pantry. It is at a time like this when all is quiet, when even nature seems to sleep, that old memories come back from their graves and haunt us with the scenes they bring before us. Faces dead long ago stare at us from the night and voices that once could make the heart leap with joy and the eye light up with pleasure seem to sound in our ears. With such feelings we sit wrapped in thought, living over again our youth until the awakening comes and we are again in the present with its cares and bitterness. It is now I sit wondering and striving to recall the past. Longingly I turn my mind back, groping about in a time that is gone, never more to return, endeavoring to think and convene my doubting spirit whether or not I fed the pup at supper. But listen! I hear the members of the V. R. C. rushing to the door. They have torn away the man stationed there to keep them inside during the transactions of the evening, and I will soon close with the request that the secretary in notifying me not to send any more letters may break the terrifying news as gently as possible, applying the balm of fair and delusive sentences which may prepare me at first by leading up gradually to the fearful and hope-destroying announcement.

  In a letter* to Mrs. J. Iv. Hall he confines himself to the two ranches of her sons.

  La Salle Co., Texas, January 20, 1883.

  Dear Mrs. Hall: Your welcome letter which I received a good while ago was much appreciated, and I thought I would answer it in the hopes of getting another from you. I am very short of news, so if you find anything in this letter rather incredible, get Doctor Beall to discount it for you to the proper size. He always questions my veracity since I came out here. Why didn’t he do it when I was at home? Dick has got his new house done, and it looks very comfortable and magnificent. It has a tobacco-barn-like grandeur about it that always strikes a stranger *The Bookman, New York, August, 1913.

  with awe, and during a strong north wind the safest place about it is outside at the northern end.

  A coloured lady is now slinging hash in the kitchen and has such an air of command and condescension about her that the pots and kettles all get out of her way with a rush. I think she is a countess or a dukess in disguise. Cotulla has grown wonderfully since you left; thirty or forty new houses have gone up and thirty or forty barrels of whiskey gone down. The barkeeper is going to Europe on a tour next summer, and is thinking of buying Mexico for his little boy to play with. They are getting along finely with the pasture; there are sixty or seventy men at work on the fence and they have been having good weather for working. Ed. Brockman is there in charge of the commissary tent, and issues provisions to the contractors. I saw him last week, and he seemed very well.

  Lee came up and asked me to go down to the camps and take Brockman’s place for a week or so while he went to San Antonio. Well, I went down some six or seven miles from the ranch. On arriving I counted at the commissary tent nine niggers, sixteen Mexicans, seven hounds, twenty-one six-shooters, four desperadoes, three shotguns, and a barrel of molasses. Inside there were a good many sacks of corn, flour, meal, sugar, beans, coffee and potatoes, a big box of bacon, some boots, shoes, clothes, saddles, rifles, tobacco and some more hounds. The work was to issue the stores to the contractors as they sent for them, and was light and easy to do. Out at the rear of the tent they had started a graveyard of men who had either kicked one of the hounds or prophesied a norther. When night came, the gentleman whose good fortune it was to be dispensing the stores gathered up his saddle-blankets, four old corn sacks, an oil coat and a sheepskin, made all the room he could in the tent by shifting and arranging the bacon, meal, etc., gave a sad look at the dogs that immediately filled the vacuum, and went and slept outdoors. The few days I was there I was treated more as a guest than one doomed to labour. Had an offer to gamble from the nigger cook, and was allowed as an especial favour to drive up the nice, pretty horses and give them some corn. And the kind of accommodating old tramps and cowboys that constitute the outfit would drop in and board, and sleep and smoke, and cuss and gamble, and lie and brag, and do everything in their power to make the time pass pleasantly and profitably — to themselves. I enjoyed the thing very much, and one evening when I saw Brockman roll up to the camp, I was very sorry, and went off very early next morning in order to escape the heartbreaking sorrow of parting and leave- taking with the layout.

  Now, if you think this fine letter worth a reply, write me a long letter and tell me what I would like to know, and I will rise up and call you a friend in need, and send you a fine cameria obscuria view of this ranch and itemised accounts of its operations and manifold charms. Tell Doctor Beall not to send me any cake; it would make some postmaster on the road ill if he should eat too much, and I am a friend to all humanity. I am writing by a very poor light, which must excuse bad spelling and uninteresting remarks.

  I remain, Very respectfully yours, W. S. Porter.

  Everybody well.

  The following letter to Mrs. Hall indicates that O. Henry had determined to leave the ranch and to strike out for the city. It is his last ranch letter:La Salle Co., Texas.

  March 13th ‘84.

  My Dear Mrs. Hall:

  As you must be somewhat surprised that I haven’t been answering your letters for a long time, I thought I would write and let you know that I never got any of them and for that reason have not replied. With the Bugle, Patriot, and your letters stopped, I am way behind in Greensboro news, and am consumed with a burning desire to know if Julius A. Gray has returned from Fayette- ville, if Caldcleugh has received a fresh assortment of canary bird cages, or if Fishblate’s clothing is still two hundred percent below first cost of manufacturing, and I know that you will take pity on the benighted of the far southwest and relieve the anxiety. Do you remember the little hymn you introduced into this country?

  Far out upon the prairie,

  How many children dwell,

  Who never read the Bible

  Nor hear the sabbath bell!

  Instead of praying Sundays,

  You hear their fire-arms bang,

  They chase cows same as Mondays

  And whoop the wild mustang.

  And seldom do they get, for

  To take to church a gal,

  It’s mighty hard you bet, for

  Them in the chaparral.

  But I will not quote any more as of course you know all the balance, and will proceed to tell you what the news is in this section. Spring has opened and the earth is clothed in verdure new. The cowboy has doffed his winter apparel and now appeareth in his summer costume of a blue flannel shirt and spurs. An occasional norther still swoops down upon him, but he buckles on an extra six shirts and defies the cold. The prairies are covered with the most lovely and gorgeous flowers of every description — columbine, jaspers, junipers, hollyhocks, asteroids, sweet-marjoram, night-blooming cereus, anthony-overs, percolators, hyoscyamuses, bergamots, crystallized anthers, fuchsias, and horoscopes. The lovely and deliciously scented meningitis twines its clustering tendrils around the tall mesquites, and the sweet little purple thanatopsis is found in profusion on every side. Tall and perfumed volutas wave in the breeze while the modest but highly-flavored megatherium nestles in the high grass. You remember how often you used to have the train stopped to gather verbenas when you were coming out here? Well, if you should come now, the engineer would have to travel the whole distance in Texas with engine reversed and all brakes down tight, you would see so many rare and beautiful specimens.

  I believe everybody that you take any interest in or know is well and all right. Everything
is quiet except the wind, and that will stop as soon as hot weather begins. I am with Spanish like Doctor Hall’s patients, still “progressing,” and can now tell a Mexican in the highest and most grammatical Castilian to tie a horse without his thinking I mean for him to turn him loose. I would like to put my knowledge of the language into profitable use, but am undecided whether consulship to Mexico or herd sheep. Doctor Beall suggests in his letter to me the other day that I come back to North Carolina and buy a shovel and go to work on the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad, but if you will examine a map of your State you will see a small but plainly discernible line surrounding the State and constituting its border. Over that border I will cross when I have some United States bonds, a knife with six blades, an oroide watch and chain, a taste for strong tobacco, and a wild western manner intensely suggestive of cash.

  I figure up that I made two thousand five hundred dollars last spring by not having any money to buy sheep with; for I would have lost every sheep in the cold and sleet of last March and a lamb for each one besides. So you see a fellow is sometimes up and sometimes down, however large a capital he handles, owing to the fluctuations of fortune and the weather.

  This is how I console myself by philosophy, which is without a flaw when analyzed; but you know philosophy, although it may furnish consolation, starts back appalled when requested to come to the front with such little necessaries as shoes and circus tickets and clothes and receipted board bills, etc.; and so some other science must be invoked to do the job. That other science has but four letters and is pronounced Work. Expect my next letter from the busy marts of commerce and trade.

  I hope you will write to me soon, when you have time. Give ‘ Doctor Hall my highest regards, and the rest of the family.

  I remain Very truly yours W. S. Porter.

  This letter had hardly reached Mrs. Hall before O. Henry found himself in Austin, the county seat of Travis and the capital of Texas. Dick Hall had moved to a new ranch in Williamson County, which forms the northern boundary of Travis County, and O. Henry had decided to give up ranch life and to live in Austin. Here he remained until October, 1895, when he went to Houston as reporter for the Houston Daily Post. Dick Hall had many friends in Austin, among them Mr. Joe Harrell, a retired merchant. Mr. Harrell was born near Greensboro, in 1811, and every fellow Carolinian found a hospitable welcome under his roof. When it was decided, therefore, that O. Henry was to remain in Austin, Mr. Harrell invited the young TarHeel and fellow countyman to come to his home, and here he lived for three years. Mr. Harrell and his three sons became devoted friends of the newcomer, whom they found to be timid and retiring but an unequalled entertainer in a coterie of intimates and a genius with his pencil. Mr. Harrell would accept nothing for board or lodging but regarded O. Henry as an adopted son.

  O. Henry’s stay in Austin was marked by the same sort of quick and wide-reaching reaction to his environment that had already become characteristic and that was to culminate during his eight years in New York. As the confinement in the Greensboro drug store had whetted his appetite for the freedom of the ranch, so the isolation of ranch life had made him all the more eager for the social contacts of city life. “A man may see so much,” says O. Henry, in “The Hiding of Black Bill,” “that he’d be bored to turn his head to look at a $3,000,000 fire or Joe Weber or the Adriatic Sea. But let him herd sheep for a spell, and you’ll see him splitting his ribs laughing at ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,’ or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies.” Austin had only about ten thousand inhabitants in 1884 but as the capital of the great State, and the seat of the rapidly growing State University, it was peculiarly representative of the old and the new, of the East and the West and the Southwest. To the knight-errant of “What’s around the corner” it offered if not a wide at least a varied field of opportunity, and he proceeded forthwith to occupy.

  His friends in Austin say that no one ever touched the city at so many points or knew its social strata as familiarly as O. Henry. Occasional clerk in a tobacco store and later in a drug store, bookkeeper for a real estate firm, draftsman in a land office, paying and receiving teller in a bank, member of a military company, singer in the choirs of the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Episcopal churches, actor in private theatricals, editor of a humorous paper, serenader and cartoonist, O. Henry would seem to have viewed the little city from all possible angles. The only segment of the life that he seems not to have touched was the University.

  And yet he can hardly be said to have identified himself with Austin or with Austin interests. Everybody who knew him liked him and felt his charm, but few got beneath the surface. “Our times lapped by only one year,” says Harry Peyton Steger, “and the freshman knew not that the wizard was around the corner, but my acquaintance there helped me in my search when I went there in January of this year. The first ten days on the ground showed me that Will Porter (it was only in his post-Texan days that people called him ‘Sydney,’ I believe) was known to hundreds and that few knew him. In his twenties and later in New York, he was the same lone wolf. But to his charm and brilliance all bear witness.” In “The Man about Town,” O. Henry questions four classes of people about his multiform subject only to find at last that the real man about town is the one who puts the questions.

  But O. Henry differed from his typical man about town as widely as Jaques differed from Hamlet, or as a yachtsman differs from a seasoned tar. He worked hard when he did work and went “bumming,” as he called it, by way of recreative reaction To go bumming was his phrase for a sort of democratic romancing. One of his Austin intimates, Dr. D. Daniels, says:

  Porter was one of the most versatile men I had ever met. He was a fine singer, could write remarkably clever stuff under all circumstances, and was a good hand at sketching. And he was the best mimic I ever saw in my life. He was one of the genuine democrats that you hear about more often than you meet. Night after night, after we would shut up shop, he would call to me to come along and “go bumming.” That was his favorite expression for the night-time prowling in which we indulged. We would wander through streets and alleys, meeting with some of the worst specimens of down-and-outers it has ever been my privilege to see at close range. I’ve seen the most ragged specimen of a bum hold up Porter, who would always do anything he could for the man. His one great failing was his inability to say “No” to a man.

  He never cared for the so-called “higher classes,” but watched the people on the streets and in the shops and cafes, getting his ideas from them night after night. I think that it was in this way he was able to picture the average man with such marvellous fidelity.

  Another chum of those days writes :(The Bookman, New York, July)

  As a business man, his face was calm, almost expressionless; his demeanour was steady, even calculated. He always worked for a high class of employers, was never wanting for a position, and was prompt, accurate, talented, and very efficient; but the minute he was out of business — that was all gone. He always approached a friend with a merry twinkle in his eye and an expression which said: “Come on, boys, we are going to have a lot of fun,” and we usually did. . . . He lived in an atmosphere of adventure that was the product of his own imagination. He was an inveterate story-teller, seemingly purely from the pleasure of it, but he never told a vulgar joke, and as much as he loved humour he would not sacrifice decency for its sake and his stories about women were always refined.

  The first paying position that O. Henry held in Austin was that of bookkeeper for the real estate firm of Maddox Brothers and Anderson. He worked here for two years at a salary of a hundred dollars a month. “He learned bookkeeping from me,” said Mr. Charles E. Anderson, “and I have never known any one to pick it up with such ease or rapidity. He was number one, and we were loath to part with him.” Mr. Anderson persuaded O. Henry to live with him after his resignation as bookkeeper, and Mr. John Maddox offered him the money to go to New York and study drawing but O. Henry declined.

  In the mea
ntime, Dick Hall had been elected Land Commissioner of Texas and O. Henry applied for a position under him. “The letter of application,” said Mrs. Hall, “was a masterpiece. Nothing that I have since seen from his pen seemed so clever. We kept it and re-read it for many years but it has mysteriously disappeared.” Dick replied that if O. Henry could prepare himself in three months for the office of assistant compiling draftsman, the position would be given him. “It was wonderful how he did it,” said Dick, “but he was the most skilful draftsman in the force.”

  O. Henry remained in the General Land Office for four years, from January, 1887, to January, 1891. The building stands just across from the Capitol on a high hill, and both its architecture and its storied service moved O. Henry’s pen as did no other building in Texas. Many years after he had left the State he was to reproduce in “Georgia’s Ruling,” “Witches’ Loaves,” and “Buried Treasure” either the General Land Office itself or some tradition or experience associated with it. “People living in other States,” he writes, “can form no conception of the vastness and importance of the work performed here and the significance of the millions of records and papers composing the archives of this office. The title deeds, patents, transfers, and legal documents connected with every foot of land owned in the State of Texas are filed here.” The building he describes as follows:

  Whenever you visit Austin you should by all means go to see the General Land Office. As you pass up the avenue you turn sharp round the corner of the court house, and on a steep hill before you you see a mediaeval castle. You think of the Rhine; the “castled crag of Drachenfels”; the Lorelei; and the vine-clad slopes of Germany. And German it is in every line of its architecture and design. The plan was drawn by an old draftsman from the “ Vaterland,” whose heart still loved the scenes of his native land, and it is said he reproduced the design of a certain castle near his birthplace with remarkable fidelity.