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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Waifs and Strays, by O. Henry
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Waifs and Strays
+       Part 1
+
+Author: O. Henry
+
+Posting Date: October 23, 2008 [EBook #2295]
+Release Date: August, 2000
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAIFS AND STRAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Earle C. Beach.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Waifs and Strays
+
+
+by
+
+O Henry
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+TWELVE STORIES
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  The Red Roses of Tonia
+  Round The Circle
+  The Rubber Plant's Story
+  Out of Nazareth
+  Confessions of a Humorist
+  The Sparrows in Madison Square
+  Hearts and Hands
+  The Cactus
+  The Detective Detector
+  The Dog and the Playlet
+  A Little Talk About Mobs
+  The Snow Man
+
+
+
+
+THE RED ROSES OF TONIA
+
+A trestle burned down on the International Railroad.  The south-bound
+from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that
+train was Tonia Weaver's Easter hat.
+
+Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a buckboard
+from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a shrugging shoulder
+and hands empty except for a cigarette.  At the small station, Nopal,
+he had learned of the delayed train and, having no commands to wait,
+turned his ponies toward the ranch again.
+
+Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any more
+for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for her loyal
+outfit of subjects that assemble at the meeting-house at Cactus, Tex.,
+a mistake has been made.  The wives and daughters of the ranchmen of
+the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new hats and gowns as
+faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest is, for one day, a
+mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise. And now it was Good
+Friday, and Tonia Weaver's Easter hat blushed unseen in the desert air
+of an impotent express car, beyond the burned trestle.  On Saturday
+noon the Rogers girls, from the Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from
+the Anchor-O, and Mrs. Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene
+at the Espinosa and pick up Tonia.  With their Easter hats and frocks
+carefully wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation
+would then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow
+they would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and
+cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.
+
+Tonia sat on the steps of the Espinosa ranch house flicking gloomily
+with a quirt at a tuft of curly mesquite.  She displayed a frown and a
+contumelious lip, and endeavored to radiate an aura of disagreeableness
+and tragedy.
+
+"I hate railroads," she announced positively.  "And men.  Men pretend
+to run them.  Can you give any excuse why a trestle should burn?  Ida
+Bennet's hat is to be trimmed with violets.  I shall not go one step
+toward Cactus without a new hat.  If I were a man I would get one."
+
+Two men listened uneasily to this disparagement of their kind. One was
+Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch.  The other was
+Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana Valley.
+Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she railed at
+railroads and menaced men.  Either would have given up his epidermis to
+make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the ostrich gives up
+his tip or the aigrette lays down its life.  Neither possessed the
+ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad deficiency against
+the coming Sabbath.  Pearson's deep brown face and sunburned light hair
+gave him the appearance of a schoolboy seized by one of youth's
+profound and insolvable melancholies.  Tonia's plight grieved him
+through and through.  Thompson Burrows was the more skilled and
+pliable.  He hailed from somewhere in the East originally; and he wore
+neckties and shoes, and was made dumb by woman's presence.
+
+"The big water-hole on Sandy Creek," said Pearson, scarcely hoping to
+make a hit, "was filled up by that last rain."
+
+"Oh!  Was it?" said Tonia sharply.  "Thank you for the information. I
+suppose a new hat is nothing to you, Mr. Pearson.  I suppose you think
+a woman ought to wear an old Stetson five years without a change, as
+you do.  If your old water-hole could have put out the fire on that
+trestle you might have some reason to talk about it."
+
+"I am deeply sorry," said Burrows, warned by Pearson's fate, "that you
+failed to receive your hat, Miss Weaver--deeply sorry, indeed. If there
+was anything I could do--"
+
+"Don't bother," interrupted Tonia, with sweet sarcasm.  "If there was
+anything you could do, you'd be doing it, of course.  There isn't."
+
+Tonia paused.  A sudden sparkle of hope had come into her eye.  Her
+frown smoothed away.  She had an inspiration.
+
+"There's a store over at Lone Elm Crossing on the Nueces," she said,
+"that keeps hats.  Eva Rogers got hers there.  She said it was the
+latest style.  It might have some left.  But it's twenty-eight miles to
+Lone Elm."
+
+The spurs of two men who hastily arose jingled; and Tonia almost
+smiled.  The Knights, then, were not all turned to dust; nor were their
+rowels rust.
+
+"Of course," said Tonia, looking thoughtfully at a white gulf cloud
+sailing across the cerulean dome, "nobody could ride to Lone Elm and
+back by the time the girls call by for me to-morrow.  So, I reckon I'll
+have to stay at home this Easter Sunday."
+
+And then she smiled.
+
+"Well, Miss Tonia," said Pearson, reaching for his hat, as guileful as
+a sleeping babe.  "I reckon I'll be trotting along back to Mucho Calor.
+There's some cutting out to be done on Dry Branch first thing in the
+morning; and me and Road Runner has got to be on hand.  It's too bad
+your hat got sidetracked.  Maybe they'll get that trestle mended yet in
+time for Easter."
+
+"I must be riding, too, Miss Tonia," announced Burrows, looking at his
+watch.  "I declare, it's nearly five o'clock!  I must be out at my
+lambing camp in time to help pen those crazy ewes."
+
+Tonia's suitors seemed to have been smitten with a need for haste. They
+bade her a ceremonious farewell, and then shook each other's hands with
+the elaborate and solemn courtesy of the Southwesterner.
+
+"Hope I'll see you again soon, Mr. Pearson," said Burrows.
+
+"Same here," said the cowman, with the serious face of one whose friend
+goes upon a whaling voyage.  "Be gratified to see you ride over to
+Mucho Calor any time you strike that section of the range."
+
+Pearson mounted Road Runner, the soundest cow-pony on the Frio, and let
+him pitch for a minute, as he always did on being mounted, even at the
+end of a day's travel.
+
+"What kind of a hat was that, Miss Tonia," he called, "that you ordered
+from San Antone?  I can't help but be sorry about that hat."
+
+"A straw," said Tonia; "the latest shape, of course; trimmed with red
+roses.  That's what I like--red roses."
+
+"There's no color more becoming to your complexion and hair," said
+Burrows, admiringly.
+
+"It's what I like," said Tonia.  "And of all the flowers, give me red
+roses.  Keep all the pinks and blues for yourself.  But what's the use,
+when trestles burn and leave you without anything?  It'll be a dry old
+Easter for me!"
+
+Pearson took off his hat and drove Road Runner at a gallop into the
+chaparral east of the Espinosa ranch house.
+
+As his stirrups rattled against the brush Burrows's long-legged sorrel
+struck out down the narrow stretch of open prairie to the southwest.
+
+Tonia hung up her quirt and went into the sitting-room.
+
+"I'm mighty sorry, daughter, that you didn't get your hat," said her
+mother.
+
+"Oh, don't worry, mother," said Tonia, coolly.  "I'll have a new hat,
+all right, in time to-morrow."
+
+
+When Burrows reached the end of the strip of prairie he pulled his
+sorrel to the right and let him pick his way daintily across a sacuista
+flat through which ran the ragged, dry bed of an arroyo. Then up a
+gravelly hill, matted with bush, the hoarse scrambled, and at length
+emerged, with a snort of satisfaction into a stretch of high, level
+prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of mesquites in their
+fresh spring foliage.  Always to the right Burrows bore, until in a
+little while he struck the old Indian trail that followed the Nueces
+southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles to the southeast,
+through Lone Elm.
+
+Here Burrows urged the sorrel into a steady lope.  As he settled
+himself in the saddle for a long ride he heard the drumming of hoofs,
+the hollow "thwack" of chaparral against wooden stirrups, the whoop of
+a  Comanche; and Wells Pearson burst out of the brush at the right of
+the trail like a precocious yellow chick from a dark green Easter egg.
+
+Except in the presence of awing femininity melancholy found no place in
+Pearson's bosom.  In Tonia's presence his voice was as soft as a summer
+bullfrog's in his reedy nest.  Now, at his gleesome yawp, rabbits, a
+mile away, ducked their ears, and sensitive plants closed their fearful
+fronds.
+
+"Moved your lambing camp pretty far from the ranch, haven't you,
+neighbor?" asked Pearson, as Road Runner fell in at the sorrel's side.
+
+"Twenty-eight miles," said Burrows, looking a little grim.  Pearson's
+laugh woke an owl one hour too early in his water-elm on the river
+bank, half a mile away.
+
+"All right for you, sheepman.  I like an open game, myself.  We're two
+locoed he-milliners hat-hunting in the wilderness.  I notify you. Burr,
+to mind your corrals.  We've got an even start, and the one that gets
+the headgear will stand some higher at the Espinosa."
+
+"You've got a good pony," said Burrows, eyeing Road Runner's
+barrel-like body and tapering legs that moved as regularly as the
+pistonrod of an engine.  "It's a race, of course; but you're too much
+of a horseman to whoop it up this soon.  Say we travel together till we
+get to the home stretch."
+
+"I'm your company," agreed Pearson, "and I admire your sense.  If
+there's hats at Lone Elm, one of 'em shall set on Miss Tonia's brow
+to-morrow, and you won't be at the crowning.  I ain't bragging, Burr,
+but that sorrel of yours is weak in the fore-legs."
+
+"My horse against yours," offered Burrows, "that Miss Tonia wears the
+hat I take her to Cactus to-morrow."
+
+"I'll take you up," shouted Pearson.  "But oh, it's just like
+horse-stealing for me!  I can use that sorrel for a lady's animal
+when--when somebody comes over to Mucho Calor, and--"
+
+Burrows' dark face glowered so suddenly that the cowman broke off his
+sentence.  But Pearson could never feel any pressure for long.
+
+"What's all this Easter business about, Burr?" he asked, cheerfully.
+"Why do the women folks have to have new hats by the almanac or bust
+all cinches trying to get 'em?"
+
+"It's a seasonable statute out of the testaments," explained Burrows.
+"It's ordered by the Pope or somebody.  And it has something to do with
+the Zodiac I don't know exactly, but I think it was invented by the
+Egyptians."
+
+"It's an all-right jubilee if the heathens did put their brand on it,"
+said Pearson; "or else Tonia wouldn't have anything to do with it.  And
+they pull it off at church, too.  Suppose there ain't but one hat in
+the Lone Elm store, Burr!"
+
+"Then," said Burrows, darkly, "the best man of us'll take it back to
+the Espinosa."
+
+"Oh, man!" cried Pearson, throwing his hat high and catching it again,
+"there's nothing like you come off the sheep ranges before. You talk
+good and collateral to the occasion.  And if there's more than one?"
+
+"Then," said Burrows, "we'll pick our choice and one of us'll get back
+first with his and the other won't."
+
+"There never was two souls," proclaimed Pearson to the stars, "that
+beat more like one heart than yourn and mine.  Me and you might be
+riding on a unicorn and thinking out of the same piece of mind."
+
+At a little past midnight the riders loped into Lone Elm. The half a
+hundred houses of the big village were dark.  On its only street the
+big wooden store stood barred and shuttered.
+
+In a few moments the horses were fastened and Pearson was pounding
+cheerfully on the door of old Sutton, the storekeeper.
+
+The barrel of a Winchester came through a cranny of a solid window
+shutter followed by a short inquiry.
+
+"Wells Pearson, of the Mucho Calor, and Burrows, of Green Valley," was
+the response.  "We want to buy some goods in the store.  Sorry to wake
+you up but we must have 'em.  Come on out, Uncle Tommy, and get a move
+on you."
+
+Uncle Tommy was slow, but at length they got him behind his counter
+with a kerosene lamp lit, and told him of their dire need.
+
+"Easter hats?" said Uncle Tommy, sleepily.  "Why, yes, I believe I have
+got just a couple left.  I only ordered a dozen this spring. I'll show
+'em to you."
+
+Now, Uncle Tommy Sutton was a merchant, half asleep or awake.  In dusty
+pasteboard boxes under the counter he had two left-over spring hats.
+But, alas! for his commercial probity on that early Saturday morn--they
+were hats of two springs ago, and a woman's eye would have detected the
+fraud at half a glance.  But to the unintelligent gaze of the
+cowpuncher and the sheepman they seemed fresh from the mint of
+contemporaneous April.
+
+The hats were of a variety once known as "cart-wheels."  They were of
+stiff straw, colored red, and flat brimmed.  Both were exactly alike,
+and trimmed lavishly around their crowns with full blown, immaculate,
+artificial white roses.
+
+"That all you got, Uncle Tommy?" said Pearson.  "All right. Not much
+choice here, Burr.  Take your pick."
+
+"They're the latest styles" lied Uncle Tommy.  "You'd see 'em on Fifth
+Avenue, if you was in New York."
+
+Uncle Tommy wrapped and tied each hat in two yards of dark calico for a
+protection.  One Pearson tied carefully to his calfskin saddle-thongs;
+and the other became part of Road Runner's burden.  They shouted thanks
+and farewells to Uncle Tommy, and cantered back into the night on the
+home stretch.
+
+The horsemen jockeyed with all their skill.  They rode more slowly on
+their way back.  The few words they spoke were not unfriendly. Burrows
+had a Winchester under his left leg slung over his saddle horn.
+Pearson had a six shooter belted around him.  Thus men rode in the Frio
+country.
+
+At half-past seven in the morning they rode to the top of a hill and
+saw the Espinosa Ranch, a white spot under a dark patch of live-oaks,
+five miles away.
+
+The sight roused Pearson from his drooping pose in the saddle. He knew
+what Road Runner could do.  The sorrel was lathered, and stumbling
+frequently; Road Runner was pegging away like a donkey engine.
+
+Pearson turned toward the sheepman and laughed.  "Good-bye, Burr," he
+cried, with a wave of his hand.  "It's a race now.  We're on the home
+stretch."
+
+He pressed Road Runner with his knees and leaned toward the Espinosa.
+Road Runner struck into a gallop, with tossing head and snorting
+nostrils, as if he were fresh from a month in pasture.
+
+Pearson rode twenty yards and heard the unmistakable sound of a
+Winchester lever throwing a cartridge into the barrel.  He dropped flat
+along his horse's back before the crack of the rifle reached his ears.
+
+It is possible that Burrows intended only to disable the horse--he was
+a good enough shot to do that without endangering his rider. But as
+Pearson stooped the ball went through his shoulder and then through
+Road Runner's neck.  The horse fell and the cowman pitched over his
+head into the hard road, and neither of them tried to move.
+
+Burrows rode on without stopping.
+
+In two hours Pearson opened his eyes and took inventory. He managed to
+get to his feet and staggered back to where Road Runner was lying.
+
+Road Runner was lying there, but he appeared to be comfortable. Pearson
+examined him and found that the bullet had "creased" him. He had been
+knocked out temporarily, but not seriously hurt.  But he was tired, and
+he lay there on Miss Tonia's hat and ate leaves from a mesquite branch
+that obligingly hung over the road.
+
+Pearson made the horse get up.  The Easter hat, loosed from the
+saddle-thongs, lay there in its calico wrappings, a shapeless thing
+from its sojourn beneath the solid carcass of Road Runner.  Then
+Pearson fainted and fell head long upon the poor hat again, crumpling
+it under his wounded shoulders.
+
+It is hard to kill a cowpuncher. In half an hour he revived--long
+enough for a woman to have fainted twice and tried ice-cream for a
+restorer. He got up carefully and found Road Runner who was busy with
+the near-by grass. He tied the unfortunate hat to the saddle again, and
+managed to get himself there, too, after many failures.
+
+At noon a gay and fluttering company waited in front of the Espinosa
+Ranch.  The Rogers girls were there in their new buckboard, and the
+Anchor-O outfit and the Green Valley folks--mostly women.  And each and
+every one wore her new Easter hat, even upon the lonely prairies, for
+they greatly desired to shine forth and do honor to the coming festival.
+
+At the gate stood Tonia, with undisguised tears upon her cheeks. In her
+hand she held Burrow's Lone Elm hat, and it was at its white roses,
+hated by her, that she wept.  For her friends were telling her, with
+the ecstatic joy of true friends, that cart-wheels could not be worn,
+being three seasons passed into oblivion.
+
+"Put on your old hat and come, Tonia," they urged.
+
+"For Easter Sunday?" she answered.  "I'll die first."  And wept again.
+
+The hats of the fortunate ones were curved and twisted into the style
+of spring's latest proclamation.
+
+A strange being rode out of the brush among them, and there sat his
+horse languidly.  He was stained and disfigured with the green of the
+grass and the limestone of rocky roads.
+
+"Hallo, Pearson," said Daddy Weaver.  "Look like you've been breaking a
+mustang.  What's that you've got tied to your saddle--a pig in a poke?"
+
+"Oh, come on, Tonia, if you're going," said Betty Rogers.  "We mustn't
+wait any longer.  We've saved a seat in the buckboard for you.  Never
+mind the hat.  That lovely muslin you've got on looks sweet enough with
+any old hat."
+
+Pearson was slowly untying the queer thing on his saddle.  Tonia looked
+at him with a sudden hope.  Pearson was a man who created hope.  He got
+the thing loose and handed it to her.  Her quick fingers tore at the
+strings.
+
+"Best I could do," said Pearson slowly.  "What Road Runner and me done
+to it will be about all it needs."
+
+"Oh, oh! it's just the right shape," shrieked Tonia.  "And red roses!
+Wait till I try it on!"
+
+She flew in to the glass, and out again, beaming, radiating, blossomed.
+
+"Oh, don't red become her?" chanted the girls in recitative.  "Hurry
+up, Tonia!"
+
+Tonia stopped for a moment by the side of Road Runner.
+
+"Thank you, thank you, Wells," she said, happily.  "It's just what I
+wanted.  Won't you come over to Cactus to-morrow and go to church with
+me?"
+
+"If I can," said Pearson.  He was looking curiously at her hat, and
+then he grinned weakly.
+
+Tonia flew into the buckboard like a bird.  The vehicles sped away for
+Cactus.
+
+"What have you been doing, Pearson?" asked Daddy Weaver.  "You ain't
+looking so well as common."
+
+"Me?" said Pearson.  "I've been painting flowers.  Them roses was white
+when I left Lone Elm.  Help me down, Daddy Weaver, for I haven't got
+any more paint to spare."
+
+
+
+ROUND THE CIRCLE
+
+[This story is especially interesting as an early treatment (1902) of
+the theme afterward developed with a surer hand in The Pendulum.]
+
+
+"Find yo' shirt all right, Sam?" asked Mrs. Webber, from her chair
+under the live-oak, where she was comfortably seated with a paper-back
+volume for company.
+
+"It balances perfeckly, Marthy," answered Sam, with a suspicious
+pleasantness in his tone.  "At first I was about ter be a little
+reckless and kick 'cause ther buttons was all off, but since I diskiver
+that the button holes is all busted out, why, I wouldn't go so fur as
+to say the buttons is any loss to speak of."
+
+"Oh, well," said his wife, carelessly, "put on your necktie--that'll
+keep it together."
+
+Sam Webber's sheep ranch was situated in the loneliest part of the
+country between the Nueces and the Frio.  The ranch house--a two-room
+box structure--was on the rise of a gently swelling hill in the midst
+of a wilderness of high chaparral.  In front of it was a small clearing
+where stood the sheep pens, shearing shed, and wool house. Only a few
+feet back of it began the thorny jungle.
+
+Sam was going to ride over to the Chapman ranch to see about buying
+some more improved merino rams.  At length he came out, ready for his
+ride.  This being a business trip of some importance, and the Chapman
+ranch being almost a small town in population and size, Sam had decided
+to "dress up" accordingly.  The result was that he had transformed
+himself from a graceful, picturesque frontiersman into something much
+less pleasing to the sight.  The tight white collar awkwardly
+constricted his muscular, mahogany-colored neck.  The buttonless shirt
+bulged in stiff waves beneath his unbuttoned vest. The suit of
+"ready-made" effectually concealed the fine lines of his straight,
+athletic figure.  His berry-brown face was set to the melancholy
+dignity befitting a prisoner of state.  He gave Randy, his
+three-year-old son, a pat on the head, and hurried out to where Mexico,
+his favorite saddle horse, was standing.
+
+Marthy, leisurely rocking in her chair, fixed her place in the book
+with her finger, and turned her head, smiling mischievously as she
+noted the havoc Sam had wrought with his appearance in trying to "fix
+up."
+
+"Well, ef I must say it, Sam," she drawled, "you look jest like one of
+them hayseeds in the picture papers, 'stead of a free and independent
+sheepman of the State o' Texas."
+
+Sam climbed awkwardly into the saddle.
+
+"You're the one ought to be 'shamed to say so," he replied hotly.
+"'Stead of 'tendin' to a man's clothes you're al'ays setting around
+a-readin' them billy-by-dam yaller-back novils."
+
+"Oh, shet up and ride along," said Mrs. Webber, with a little jerk at
+the handles of her chair; "you always fussin' 'bout my readin'.  I do
+a-plenty; and I'll read when I wanter.  I live in the bresh here like a
+varmint, never seein' nor hearin' nothin', and what other 'musement kin
+I have?  Not in listenin' to you talk, for it's complain, complain, one
+day after another.  Oh, go on, Sam, and leave me in peace."
+
+Sam gave his pony a squeeze with his knees and "shoved" down the wagon
+trail that connected his ranch with the old, open Government road.  It
+was eight o'clock, and already beginning to be very warm. He should
+have started three hours earlier.  Chapman ranch was only eighteen
+miles away, but there was a road for only three miles of the distance.
+He had ridden over there once with one of the Half-Moon cowpunchers,
+and he had the direction well-defined in his mind.
+
+Sam turned off the old Government road at the split mesquite, and
+struck down the arroyo of the Quintanilla.  Here was a narrow stretch
+of smiling valley, upholstered with a rich mat of green, curly mesquite
+grass; and Mexico consumed those few miles quickly with his long, easy
+lope.  Again, upon reaching Wild Duck Waterhole, must he abandon
+well-defined ways.  He turned now to his right up a little hill,
+pebble-covered, upon which grew only the tenacious and thorny prickly
+pear and chaparral.  At the summit of this he paused to take his last
+general view of the landscape for, from now on, he must wind through
+brakes and thickets of chaparral, pear, and mesquite, for the most part
+seeing scarcely farther than twenty yards in any direction, choosing
+his way by the prairie-dweller's instinct, guided only by an occasional
+glimpse of a far distant hilltop, a peculiarly shaped knot of trees, or
+the position of the sun.
+
+Sam rode down the sloping hill and plunged into the great pear flat
+that lies between the Quintanilla and the Piedra.
+
+In about two hours he discovered that he was lost.  Then came the usual
+confusion of mind and the hurry to get somewhere.  Mexico was anxious
+to redeem the situation, twisting with alacrity along the tortuous
+labyrinths of the jungle.  At the moment his master's sureness of the
+route had failed his horse had divined the fact. There were no hills
+now that they could climb to obtain a view of the country.  They came
+upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was the brush that scarcely
+could a rabbit penetrate the mass.  They were in the great, lonely
+thicket of the Frio bottoms.
+
+It was a mere nothing for a cattleman or a sheepman to be lost for a
+day or a night.  The thing often happened.  It was merely a matter of
+missing a meal or two and sleeping comfortably on your saddle blankets
+on a soft mattress of mesquite grass.  But in Sam's case it was
+different.  He had never been away from his ranch at night. Marthy was
+afraid of the country--afraid of Mexicans, of snakes, of panthers, even
+of sheep.  So he had never left her alone.
+
+It must have been about four in the afternoon when Sam's conscience
+awoke.  He was limp and drenched, rather from anxiety than the heat or
+fatigue.  Until now he had been hoping to strike the trail that led to
+the Frio crossing and the Chapman ranch.  He must have crossed it at
+some dim part of it and ridden beyond.  If so he was now something like
+fifty miles from home.  If he could strike a ranch--a camp--any place
+where he could get a fresh horse and inquire the road, he would ride
+all night to get back to Marthy and the kid.
+
+So, I have hinted, Sam was seized by remorse.  There was a big lump in
+his throat as he thought of the cross words he had spoken to his wife.
+Surely it was hard enough for her to live in that horrible country
+without having to bear the burden of his abuse.  He cursed himself
+grimly, and felt a sudden flush of shame that over-glowed the summer
+heat as he remembered the many times he had flouted and railed at her
+because she had a liking for reading fiction.
+
+"Ther only so'ce ov amusement ther po' gal's got," said Sam aloud, with
+a sob, which unaccustomed sound caused Mexico to shy a bit. "A-livin'
+with a sore-headed kiote like me--a low-down skunk that ought to be
+licked to death with a saddle cinch--a-cookin' and a-washin' and
+a-livin' on mutton and beans and me abusin' her fur takin' a squint or
+two in a little book!"
+
+He thought of Marthy as she had been when he first met her in
+Dogtown--smart, pretty, and saucy--before the sun had turned the roses
+in her cheeks brown and the silence of the chaparral had tamed her
+ambitions.
+
+"Ef I ever speaks another hard word to ther little gal," muttered Sam,
+"or fails in the love and affection that's coming to her in the deal, I
+hopes a wildcat'll t'ar me to pieces."
+
+He knew what he would do.  He would write to Garcia & Jones, his San
+Antonio merchants where he bought his supplies and sold his wool, and
+have them send down a big box of novels and reading matter for Marthy.
+Things were going to be different.  He wondered whether a little piano
+could be placed in one of the rooms of the ranch house without the
+family having to move out of doors.
+
+In nowise calculated to allay his self-reproach was the thought that
+Marthy and Randy would have to pass the night alone.  In spite of their
+bickerings, when night came Marthy was wont to dismiss her fears of the
+country, and rest her head upon Sam's strong arm with a sigh of
+peaceful content and dependence.  And were her fears so groundless? Sam
+thought of roving, marauding Mexicans, of stealthy cougars that
+sometimes invaded the ranches, of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a dozen
+possible dangers.  Marthy would be frantic with fear.  Randy would cry,
+and call for dada to come.
+
+Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and
+mesquite.  Hollow after hollow, slope after slope--all exactly
+alike--all familiar by constant repetition, and yet all strange and
+new. If he could only arrive _somewhere_.
+
+The straight line is Art.  Nature moves in circles.  A straightforward
+man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist is.  Men lost in
+the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their
+footprints have attested.  Also, travellers in philosophy and other
+mental processes frequently wind up at their starting-point.
+
+It was when Sam Webber was fullest of contrition and good resolves that
+Mexico, with a heavy sigh, subsided from his regular, brisk trot into a
+slow complacent walk.  They were winding up an easy slope covered with
+brush ten or twelve feet high.
+
+"I say now, Mex," demurred Sam, "this here won't do.  I know you're
+plumb tired out, but we got ter git along.  Oh, Lordy, ain't there no
+mo' houses in the world!"  He gave Mexico a smart kick with his heels.
+
+Mexico gave a protesting grunt as if to say:  "What's the use of that,
+now we're so near?"  He quickened his gait into a languid trot.
+Rounding a great clump of black chaparral he stopped short.  Sam
+dropped the bridle reins and sat, looking into the back door of his own
+house, not ten yards away.
+
+Marthy, serene and comfortable, sat in her rocking-chair before the
+door in the shade of the house, with her feet resting luxuriously upon
+the steps.  Randy, who was playing with a pair of spurs on the ground,
+looked up for a moment at his father and went on spinning the rowels
+and singing a little song.  Marthy turned her head lazily against the
+back of the chair and considered the arrivals with emotionless eyes.
+She held a book in her lap with her finger holding the place.
+
+Sam shook himself queerly, like a man coming out of a dream, and slowly
+dismounted.  He moistened his dry lips.
+
+"I see you are still a-settin'," he said, "a-readin' of them
+billy-by-dam yaller-back novils."
+
+Sam had traveled round the circle and was himself again.
+
+
+
+THE RUBBER PLANT'S STORY
+
+We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom
+and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue
+theatre.  I haven't looked up our family tree, but I believe we were
+raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table d'hote stalk of
+asparagus.  You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of
+independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna
+and flora of a flat.  What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant
+is to the dweller in flats and furnished rooms.  We get moved from one
+place to another so quickly that the only way we can get our picture
+taken is with a kinetoscope.  We are the vagrant vine and the flitting
+fig tree.  You know the proverb: "Where the rubber plant sits in the
+window the moving van draws up to the door."
+
+We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle.  No
+other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much
+handling as we can.  When the family to which we belong moves into a
+flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates,
+fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of "Home Sweet Home." We aren't as
+green as we look.  I guess we are about what you would call the
+soubrettes of the conservatory.  You try sitting in the front window of
+a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street all day, and
+back into the flat at night, and see whether you get wise or not--hey?
+Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of
+Eden--say! suppose there had been a rubber plant there when Eve--but I
+was going to tell you a story.
+
+The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged to
+a member of the pony ballet.  I was kept in a sunny window, and was
+generally watered with seltzer and lemon.  I had plenty of fun in those
+days.  I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the automobiles
+in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the same time.
+
+Well, then the angel that was molting for the musical comedy lost his
+last feather and the company broke up.  The ponies trotted away and I
+was left in the window ownerless.  The janitor gave me to a refined
+comedy team on the eighth floor, and in six weeks I had been set in the
+window of five different flats I took on experience and put out two
+more leaves.
+
+Miss Carruthers, of the refined comedy team--did you ever see her cross
+both feet back of her neck?--gave me to a friend of hers who had made
+an unfortunate marriage with a man in a store.  Consequently I was
+placed in the window of a furnished room, rent in advance, water two
+flights up, gas extra after ten o'clock at night.  Two of my leaves
+withered off here.  Also, I was moved from one room to another so many
+times that I got to liking the odor of the pipes the expressmen smoked.
+
+I don't think I ever had so dull a time as I did with this lady. There
+was never anything amusing going on inside--she was devoted to her
+husband, and, besides leaning out the window and flirting with the
+iceman, she never did a thing toward breaking the monotony.
+
+When the couple broke up they left me with the rest of their goods at a
+second-hand store.  I was put out in front for sale along with the
+jobbiest lot you ever heard of being lumped into one bargain.  Think of
+this little cornucopia of wonders, all for $1.89:  Henry James's works,
+six talking machine records, one pair of tennis shoes, two bottles of
+horse radish, and a rubber plant--that was me!
+
+One afternoon a girl came along and stopped to look at me.  She had
+dark hair and eyes, and she looked slim, and sad around the mouth.
+
+"Oh, oh!" she says to herself.  "I never thought to see one up here."
+
+She pulls out a little purse about as thick as one of my leaves and
+fingers over some small silver in it.  Old Koen, always on the lockout,
+is ready, rubbing his hands.  This girl proceeds to turn down Mr. James
+and the other commodities.  Rubber plants or nothing is the burden of
+her song.  And at last Koen and she come together at 39 cents, and away
+she goes with me in her arms.
+
+She was a nice girl, but not my style.  Too quiet and sober looking.
+Thinks I to myself:  "I'll just about land on the fire-escape of a
+tenement, six stories up.  And I'll spend the next six months looking
+at clothes on the line."
+
+But she carried me to a nice little room only three flights up in quite
+a decent street.  And she put me in the window, of course.  And then
+she went to work and cooked dinner for herself.  And what do you
+suppose she had?  Bread and tea and a little dab of jam!  Nothing else.
+Not a single lobster, nor so much as one bottle of champagne. The
+Carruthers comedy team had both every evening, except now and then when
+they took a notion for pig's knuckle and kraut.
+
+After she had finished her dinner my new owner came to the window and
+leaned down close to my leaves and cried softly to herself for a while.
+It made me feel funny.  I never knew anybody to cry that way over a
+rubber plant before.  Of course, I've seen a few of 'em turn on the
+tears for what they could get out of it, but she seemed to be crying
+just for the pure enjoyment of it.  She touched my leaves like she
+loved 'em, and she bent down her head and kissed each one of 'em. I
+guess I'm about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid on earth,
+but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer.  Home never was like that
+to me before.  Generally I used to get chewed by poodles and have
+shirt-waists hung on me to dry, and get watered with coffee grounds and
+peroxide of hydrogen.
+
+This girl had a piano in the room, and she used to disturb it with both
+hands while she made noises with her mouth for hours at a time. I
+suppose she was practising vocal music.
+
+One day she seemed very much excited and kept looking at the clock. At
+eleven somebody knocked and she let in a stout, dark man with towsled
+black hair.  He sat down at once at the piano and played while she sang
+for him.  When she finished she laid one hand on her bosom and looked
+at him.  He shook his head, and she leaned against the piano.  "Two
+years already," she said, speaking slowly--"do you think in two
+more--or even longer?"
+
+The man shook his head again.  "You waste your time," he said, roughly
+I thought.  "The voice is not there."  And then he looked at her in a
+peculiar way.  "But the voice is not everything," he went on.  "You
+have looks.  I can place you, as I told you if--"
+
+The girl pointed to the door without saying anything, and the dark man
+left the room.  And then she came over and cried around me again. It's
+a good thing I had enough rubber in me to be water-proof.
+
+About that time somebody else knocked at the door.  "Thank goodness," I
+said to myself.  "Here's a chance to get the water-works turned off.  I
+hope it's somebody that's game enough to stand a bird and a bottle to
+liven things up a little."  Tell you the truth, this little girl made
+me tired.  A rubber plant likes to see a little sport now and then.  I
+don't suppose there's another green thing in New York that sees as much
+of gay life unless it's the chartreuse or the sprigs of parsley around
+the dish.
+
+When the girl opens the door in steps a young chap in a traveling cap
+and picks her up in his arms, and she sings out "Oh, Dick!" and stays
+there long enough to--well, you've been a rubber plant too, sometimes,
+I suppose.
+
+"Good thing!" says I to myself.  "This is livelier than scales and
+weeping.  Now there'll be something doing."
+
+"You've got to go back with me," says the young man.  "I've come two
+thousand miles for you.  Aren't you tired of it yet. Bess?  You've kept
+all of us waiting so long.  Haven't you found out yet what is best?"
+
+"The bubble burst only to-day," says the girl.  "Come here, Dick, and
+see what I found the other day on the sidewalk for sale."  She brings
+him by the hand and exhibits yours truly.  "How one ever got away up
+here who can tell?  I bought it with almost the last money I had."
+
+He looked at me, but he couldn't keep his eyes off her for more than a
+second.  "Do you remember the night, Bess," he said, "when we stood
+under one of those on the bank of the bayou and what you told me then?"
+
+"Geewillikins!" I said to myself.  "Both of them stand under a rubber
+plant!  Seems to me they are stretching matters somewhat!"
+
+"Do I not," says she, looking up at him and sneaking close to his vest,
+"and now I say it again, and it is to last forever.  Look, Dick, at its
+leaves, how wet they are.  Those are my tears, and it was thinking of
+you that made them fall."
+
+"The dear old magnolias!" says the young man, pinching one of my
+leaves.  "I love them all."
+
+Magnolia!  Well, wouldn't that--say! those innocents thought I was a
+magnolia!  What the--well, wasn't that tough on a genuine little old
+New York rubber plant?
+
+
+
+OUT OF NAZARETH
+
+Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it
+with a "wad."  Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt,
+a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that
+showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town.  These
+things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to
+the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist.  Okochee
+felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only
+alligator in the swamp, so to speak.  And then that harmless, but
+persistent, individual so numerous in the South--the man who is always
+clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar's worth
+of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar--that man added his deadly
+work to the tourist's innocent praise, and Okochee fell.
+
+The Cooloosa River winds through a range of small mountains, passes
+Okochee and then blends its waters trippingly, as fall the mellifluous
+Indian syllables, with the Chattahoochee.
+
+Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post-office stoop,
+hitched up its suspender, and threw a granite dam two hundred and forty
+feet long and sixty feet high across the Cooloosa one mile above the
+town.  Thereupon, a dimpling, sparkling lake backed up twenty miles
+among the little mountains.  Thus in the great game of municipal
+rivalry did Okochee match that famous drawing card, the Hudson.  It was
+conceded that nowhere could the Palisades be judged superior in the way
+of scenery and grandeur.  Following the picture card was played the ace
+of commercial importance.  Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam
+furnish.  Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise
+up as the green corn after a shower. The spindle and the flywheel and
+turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee.  Along the picturesque
+heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the
+splendid summer residences of capital.  The naphtha launch of the
+millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills
+would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park.  Money would be
+spent like water in Okochee, and water would be turned into money.
+
+The fate of the good town is quickly told.  Capital decided not to
+invest.  Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to
+fulfilment.  The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn
+granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they
+could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold.  The
+sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should
+charm away heart-burning.  Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood
+and clime, was lulled by the spell.  It climbed out of the arena,
+loosed its suspender, sat down again on the post-office stoop, and took
+a chew.  It consoled itself by drawling sarcasms at the city council
+which was not to blame, causing the fathers, as has been said, to seek
+back streets and figure perspiringly on the sinking fund and the
+appropriation for interest due.
+
+The youth of Okochee--they who were to carry into the rosy future the
+burden of the debt--accepted failure with youth's uncalculating joy.
+For, here was sport, aquatic and nautical, added to the meagre round of
+life's pleasures.  In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded
+the lake to its limits.  Girls wore silk waists embroidered with
+anchors in blue and pink.  The trousers of the young men widened at the
+bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft-plied oar.
+Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy.  Sailboats
+and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice-cream booths
+sprang up about the little wooden pier.  Two small excursion steamboats
+were built, and plied the delectable waters. Okochee philosophically
+gave up the hope of eating turtle soup with a gold spoon, and settled
+back, not ill content, to its regular diet of lotus and fried hominy.
+And out of this slow wreck of great expectations rose up J. Pinkney
+Bloom with his "wad" and his prosperous, cheery smile.
+
+Needless to say J. Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil.  He came out
+of that flushed and capable region known as the "North."  He called
+himself a "promoter"; his enemies had spoken of him as a "grafter";
+Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse
+than a "Yank."
+
+Far up the lake--eighteen miles above the town--the eye of this
+cheerful camp-follower of booms had spied out a graft.  He purchased
+there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty-five cents per
+acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland--the
+Queen City of the Switzerland of the South.  Streets and avenues were
+surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the
+"proposed" opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools,
+and "Exposition Hall."  The price of lots ranged from five to five
+hundred dollars.  Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five
+hundred dollars.
+
+While the boom was growing in Okochee, J. Pinkney's circulars, maps,
+and prospectuses were flying through the mails to every part of the
+country.  Investors sent in their money by post, and the Skyland Real
+Estate Company (J. Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed
+on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day. All this
+time the catamount screeched upon the reserved lot of the Skyland Board
+of Trade, the opossum swung by his tail over the site of the exposition
+hall, and the owl hooted a melancholy recitative to his audience of
+young squirrels in opera house square.  Later, when the money was
+coming in fast, J. Pinkney caused to be erected in the coming city half
+a dozen cheap box houses, and persuaded a contingent of indigent
+natives to occupy them, thereby assuming the role of "population" in
+subsequent prospectuses, which became, accordingly, more seductive and
+remunerative.
+
+So, when the dream faded and Okochee dropped back to digging bait and
+nursing its two and a half per cent. tax, J. Pinkney Bloom (unloving of
+checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped
+about his fifty-two-inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight
+thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.
+
+One last trip he was making to Skyland before departing to other salad
+fields.  Skyland was a regular post-office, and the steamboat, _Dixie
+Belle_, under contract, delivered the mail bag (generally empty) twice
+a week.  There was a little business there to be settled--the
+postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and
+the "inhabitants" had to be furnished with another month's homely
+rations, as per agreement.  And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney
+Bloom no more.  The owners of these precipitous, barren, useless lots
+might come and view the scene of their invested credulity, or they
+might leave them to their fit tenants, the wild hog and the browsing
+deer.  The work of the Skyland Real Estate Company was finished.
+
+The little steamboat _Dixie Belle_ was about to shove off on her
+regular up-the-lake trip, when a rickety hired carriage rattled up to
+the pier, and a tall, elderly gentleman, in black, stepped out,
+signaling courteously but vivaciously for the boat to wait.  Time was
+of the least importance in the schedule of the _Dixie Belle_; Captain
+MacFarland gave the order, and the boat received its ultimate two
+passengers.  For, upon the arm of the tall, elderly gentleman, as he
+crossed the gangway, was a little elderly lady, with a gray curl
+depending quaintly forward of her left ear.
+
+Captain MacFarland was at the wheel; therefore it seemed to J. Pinkney
+Bloom, who was the only other passenger, that it should be his to play
+the part of host to the boat's new guests, who were, doubtless, on a
+scenery-viewing expedition.  He stepped forward, with that translucent,
+child-candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of
+unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its
+exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of
+manner that so well suited his calling--with all his stock in trade
+well to the front; he stepped forward to receive Colonel and Mrs.
+Peyton Blaylock.  With the grace of a grand marshal or a wedding usher,
+he escorted the two passengers to a side of the upper deck, from which
+the scenery was supposed to present itself to the observer in increased
+quantity and quality.  There, in comfortable steamer chairs, they sat
+and began to piece together the random lines that were to form an
+intelligent paragraph in the big history of little events.
+
+"Our home, sir," said Colonel Blaylock, removing his wide-brimmed,
+rather shapeless black felt hat, "is in Holly Springs--Holly Springs,
+Georgia.  I am very proud to make your acquaintance, Mr. Bloom. Mrs.
+Blaylock and myself have just arrived in Okochee this morning, sir, on
+business--business of importance in connection with the recent rapid
+march of progress in this section of our state."
+
+The Colonel smoothed back, with a sweeping gesture, his long, smooth,
+locks.  His dark eyes, still fiery under the heavy black brows, seemed
+inappropriate to the face of a business man.  He looked rather to be an
+old courtier handed down from the reign of Charles, and re-attired in a
+modern suit of fine, but raveling and seam-worn, broadcloth.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Mr. Bloom, in his heartiest prospectus voice, "things
+have been whizzing around Okochee.  Biggest industrial revival and
+waking up to natural resources Georgia ever had.  Did you happen to
+squeeze in on the ground floor in any of the gilt-edged grafts,
+Colonel?"
+
+"Well, sir," said the Colonel, hesitating in courteous doubt, "if I
+understand your question, I may say that I took the opportunity to make
+an investment that I believe will prove quite advantageous--yes, sir, I
+believe it will result in both pecuniary profit and agreeable
+occupation."
+
+"Colonel Blaylock," said the little elderly lady, shaking her gray curl
+and smiling indulgent explanation at J. Pinkney Bloom, "is so devoted
+to businesss.  He has such a talent for financiering and markets and
+investments and those kind of things.  I think myself extremely
+fortunate in having secured him for a partner on life's journey--I am
+so unversed in those formidable but very useful branches of learning."
+
+Colonel Blaylock rose and made a bow--a bow that belonged with silk
+stockings and lace ruffles and velvet.
+
+"Practical affairs," he said, with a wave of his hand toward the
+promoter, "are, if I may use the comparison, the garden walks upon
+which we tread through life, viewing upon either side of us the flowers
+which brighten that journey.   It is my pleasure to be able to lay out
+a walk or two.  Mrs. Blaylock, sir, is one of those fortunate higher
+spirits whose mission it is to make the flowers grow. Perhaps, Mr.
+Bloom, you have perused the lines of Lorella, the Southern poetess.
+That is the name above which Mrs. Blaylock has contributed to the press
+of the South for many years."
+
+"Unfortunately," said Mr. Bloom, with a sense of the loss clearly
+written upon his frank face, "I'm like the Colonel--in the walk-making
+business myself--and I haven't had time to even take a sniff at the
+flowers.  Poetry is a line I never dealt in.  It must be nice,
+though--quite nice."
+
+"It is the region," smiled Mrs. Blaylock, "in which my soul dwells. My
+shawl, Peyton, if you please--the breeze comes a little chilly from yon
+verdured hills."
+
+The Colonel drew from the tail pocket of his coat a small shawl of
+knitted silk and laid it solicitously about the shoulders of the lady.
+Mrs. Blaylock sighed contentedly, and turned her expressive eyes--still
+as clear and unworldly as a child's--upon the steep slopes that were
+slowly slipping past.  Very fair and stately they looked in the clear
+morning air.  They seemed to speak in familiar terms to the responsive
+spirit of Lorella.  "My native hills!" she murmured, dreamily.  "See
+how the foliage drinks the sunlight from the hollows and dells."
+
+"Mrs. Blaylock's maiden days," said the Colonel, interpreting her mood
+to J. Pinkney Bloom, "were spent among the mountains of northern
+Georgia.  Mountain air and mountain scenery recall to her those days.
+Holly Springs, where we have lived for twenty years, is low and flat. I
+fear that she may have suffered in health and spirits by so long a
+residence there.  That is one portent reason for the change we are
+making.  My dear, can you not recall those lines you wrote--entitled, I
+think, 'The Georgia Hills'--the poem that was so extensively copied by
+the Southern press and praised so highly by the Atlanta critics?"
+
+Mrs. Blaylock turned a glance of speaking tenderness upon the Colonel,
+fingered for a moment the silvery curl that drooped upon her bosom,
+then looked again toward the mountains.  Without preliminary or
+affectation or demurral she began, in rather thrilling and more deeply
+pitched tones to recite these lines:
+
+  "The Georgia hills, the Georgia hills!--
+    Oh, heart, why dost thou pine?
+  Are not these sheltered lowlands fair
+    With mead and bloom and vine?
+  Ah! as the slow-paced river here
+    Broods on its natal rills
+  My spirit drifts, in longing sweet,
+    Back to the Georgia hills.
+
+  "And through the close-drawn, curtained night
+    I steal on sleep's slow wings
+  Back to my heart's ease--slopes of pine--
+    Where end my wanderings.
+  Oh, heaven seems nearer from their tops--
+    And farther earthly ills--
+  Even in dreams, if I may but
+    Dream of my Georgia hills.
+
+  The grass upon their orchard sides
+    Is a fine couch to me;
+  The common note of each small bird
+    Passes all minstrelsy.
+  It would not seem so dread a thing
+    If, when the Reaper wills,
+  He might come there and take my hand
+    Up in the Georgia hills."
+
+
+"That's great stuff, ma'am," said J. Pinkney Bloom, enthusiastically,
+when the poetess had concluded.  "I wish I had looked up poetry more
+than I have.  I was raised in the pine hills myself."
+
+"The mountains ever call to their children," murmured Mrs. Blaylock. "I
+feel that life will take on the rosy hue of hope again in among these
+beautiful hills.  Peyton--a little taste of the currant wine, if you
+will be so good.  The journey, though delightful in the extreme,
+slightly fatigues me."  Colonel Blaylock again visited the depths of
+his prolific coat, and produced a tightly corked, rough, black bottle.
+Mr. Bloom was on his feet in an instant.
+
+"Let me bring a glass, ma'am.  You come along, Colonel--there's a
+little table we can bring, too.  Maybe we can scare up some fruit or a
+cup of tea on board.  I'll ask Mac."
+
+Mrs. Blaylock reclined at ease.  Few royal ladies have held their royal
+prerogative with the serene grace of the petted Southern woman. The
+Colonel, with an air as gallant and assiduous as in the days of his
+courtship, and J. Pinkney Bloom, with a ponderous agility half
+professional and half directed by some resurrected, unnamed,
+long-forgotten sentiment, formed a diversified but attentive court.
+The currant wine--wine home made from the Holly Springs fruit--went
+round, and then J. Pinkney began to hear something of Holly Springs
+life.
+
+It seemed (from the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was
+decadent.  A third of the population had moved away.  Business--and the
+Colonel was an authority on business--had dwindled to nothing. After
+carefully studying the field of opportunities open to capital he had
+sold his little property there for eight hundred dollars and invested
+it in one of the enterprises opened up by the book in Okochee.
+
+"Might I inquire, sir," said Mr. Bloom, "in what particular line of
+business you inserted your coin?  I know that town as well as I know
+the regulations for illegal use of the mails.  I might give you a hunch
+as to whether you can make the game go or not."
+
+J. Pinkney, somehow, had a kindly feeling toward these unsophisticated
+representatives of by-gone days.  They were so simple, impractical, and
+unsuspecting.  He was glad that he happened not to have a gold brick or
+a block of that western Bad Boy Silver Mine stock along with him.  He
+would have disliked to unload on people he liked so well as he did
+these; but there are some temptations toe enticing to be resisted.
+
+"No, sir," said Colonel Blaylock, pausing to arrange the queen's wrap.
+"I did not invest in Okochee.  I have made an exhaustive study of
+business conditions, and I regard old settled towns as unfavorable
+fields in which to place capital that is limited in amount.  Some
+months ago, through the kindness of a friend, there came into my hands
+a map and description of this new town of Skyland that has been built
+upon the lake.  The description was so pleasing, the future of the town
+set forth in such convincing arguments, and its increasing prosperity
+portrayed in such an attractive style that I decided to take advantage
+of the opportunity it offered.  I carefully selected a lot in the
+centre of the business district, although its price was the highest in
+the schedule--five hundred dollars--and made the purchase at once."
+
+"Are you the man--I mean, did you pay five hundred dollars for a lot in
+Skyland" asked J. Pinkney Bloom.
+
+"I did, sir," answered the Colonel, with the air of a modest
+millionaire explaining his success; "a lot most excellently situated on
+the same square with the opera house, and only two squares from the
+board of trade.  I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one. It is
+my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a
+modest book and stationery store.  During past years I have met with
+many pecuniary reverses, and I now find it necessary to engage in some
+commercial occupation that will furnish me with a livelihood.  The book
+and stationery business, though an humble one, seems to me not inapt
+nor altogether uncongenial.  I am a graduate of the University of
+Virginia; and Mrs. Blaylock's really wonderful acquaintance with
+belles-lettres and poetic literature should go far toward insuring
+success.  Of course, Mrs. Blaylock would not personally serve behind
+the counter.  With the nearly three hundred dollars I have remaining I
+can manage the building of a house, by giving a lien on the lot.  I
+have an old friend in Atlanta who is a partner in a large book store,
+and he has agreed to furnish me with a stock of goods on credit, on
+extremely easy terms.  I am pleased to hope, sir, that Mrs. Blaylock's
+health and happiness will be increased by the change of locality.
+Already I fancy I can perceive the return of those roses that were once
+the hope and despair of Georgia cavaliers."
+
+Again followed that wonderful bow, as the Colonel lightly touched the
+pale cheek of the poetess.  Mrs. Blaylock, blushing like a girl, shook
+her curl and gave the Colonel an arch, reproving tap.  Secret of
+eternal youth--where art thou?  Every second the answer comes--"Here,
+here, here."  Listen to thine own heartbeats, O weary seeker after
+external miracles.
+
+"Those years," said Mrs. Blaylock, "in Holly Springs were long, long,
+long.  But now is the promised land in sight.  Skyland!--a lovely name."
+
+"Doubtless," said the Colonel, "we shall be able to secure comfortable
+accommodations at some modest hotel at reasonable rates.  Our trunks
+are in Okochee, to be forwarded when we shall have made permanent
+arrangements."
+
+J. Pinkney Bloom excused himself, went forward, and stood by the
+captain at the wheel.
+
+"Mac," said he, "do you remember my telling you once that I sold one of
+those five-hundred-dollar lots in Skyland?"
+
+"Seems I do," grinned Captain MacFarland.
+
+"I'm not a coward, as a general rule," went on the promoter, "but I
+always said that if I ever met the sucker that bought that lot I'd run
+like a turkey.  Now, you see that old babe-in-the-wood over there?
+Well, he's the boy that drew the prize.  That was the only
+five-hundred-dollar lot that went.  The rest ranged from ten dollars to
+two hundred.  His wife writes poetry.  She's invented one about the
+high grounds of Georgia, that's way up in G.  They're going to Skyland
+to open a book store."
+
+"Well," said MacFarland, with another grin, "it's a good thing you are
+along, J. P.; you can show 'em around town until they begin to feel at
+home."
+
+"He's got three hundred dollars left to build a house and store with,"
+went on J. Pinkney, as if he were talking to himself.  "And he thinks
+there's an open house up there."
+
+Captain MacFarland released the wheel long enough to give his leg a
+roguish slap.
+
+"You old fat rascal!" he chuckled, with a wink.
+
+"Mac, you're a fool," said J. Pinkney Bloom, coldly.  He went back and
+joined the Blaylocks, where he sat, less talkative, with that straight
+furrow between his brows that always stood as a signal of schemes being
+shaped within.
+
+"There's a good many swindles connected with these booms," he said
+presently.  "What if this Skyland should turn out to be one--that is,
+suppose business should be sort of dull there, and no special sale for
+books?"
+
+"My dear sir," said Colonel Blaylock, resting his hand upon the back of
+his wife's chair, "three times I have been reduced to almost penury by
+the duplicity of others, but I have not yet lost faith in humanity. If
+I have been deceived again, still we may glean health and content, if
+not worldly profit.  I am aware that there are dishonest schemers in
+the world who set traps for the unwary, but even they are not
+altogether bad.  My dear, can you recall those verses entitled 'He
+Giveth the Increase,' that you composed for the choir of our church in
+Holly Springs?"
+
+"That was four years ago," said Mrs. Blaylock; "perhaps I can repeat a
+verse or two.
+
+  "The lily springs from the rotting mould;
+    Pearls from the deep sea slime;
+  Good will come out of Nazareth
+    All in God's own time.
+
+  "To the hardest heart the softening grace
+    Cometh, at last, to bless;
+  Guiding it right to help and cheer
+    And succor in distress.
+
+"I cannot remember the rest.  The lines were not ambitious.  They were
+written to the music composed by a dear friend."
+
+"It's a fine rhyme, just the same," declared Mr. Bloom.  "It seems to
+ring the bell, all right.  I guess I gather the sense of it.  It means
+that the rankest kind of a phony will give you the best end of it once
+in a while."
+
+Mr. Bloom strayed thoughtfully back to the captain, and stood
+meditating.
+
+"Ought to be in sight of the spires and gilded domes of Skyland now in
+a few minutes," chirruped MacFarland, shaking with enjoyment.
+
+"Go to the devil," said Mr. Bloom, still pensive.
+
+And now, upon the left bank, they caught a glimpse of a white village,
+high up on the hills, smothered among green trees.  That was Cold
+Branch--no boom town, but the slow growth of many years.  Cold Branch
+lay on the edge of the grape and corn lands.  The big country road ran
+just back of the heights.  Cold Branch had nothing in common with the
+frisky ambition of Okochee with its impertinent lake.
+
+"Mac," said J. Pinkney suddenly, "I want you to stop at Cold Branch.
+There's a landing there that they made to use sometimes when the river
+was up."
+
+"Can't," said the captain, grinning more broadly.  "I've got the United
+States mails on board.  Right to-day this boat's in the government
+service.  Do you want to have the poor old captain keelhauled by Uncle
+Sam?  And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its
+mail?  I'm ashamed of your extravagance, J. P."
+
+"Mac," almost whispered J. Pinkney, in his danger-line voice, "I looked
+into the engine room of the _Dixie Belle_ a while ago.  Don't you know
+of somebody that needs a new boiler?  Cement and black Japan can't hide
+flaws from me.  And then, those shares of building and loan that you
+traded for repairs--they were all yours, of course.  I hate to mention
+these things, but--"
+
+"Oh, come now, J. P.," said the captain.  "You know I was just fooling.
+I'll put you off at Cold Branch, if you say so."
+
+"The other passengers get off there, too," said Mr. Bloom.
+
+Further conversation was held, and in ten minutes the _Dixie Belle_
+turned her nose toward a little, cranky wooden pier on the left bank,
+and the captain, relinquishing the wheel to a roustabout, came to the
+passenger deck and made the remarkable announcement:  "All out for
+Skyland."
+
+The Blaylocks and J. Pinkney Bloom disembarked, and the _Dixie Belle_
+proceeded on her way up the lake.  Guided by the indefatigable
+promoter, they slowly climbed the steep hillside, pausing often to rest
+and admire the view.  Finally they entered the village of Cold Branch.
+Warmly both the Colonel and his wife praised it for its homelike and
+peaceful beauty.  Mr. Bloom conducted them to a two-story building on a
+shady street that bore the legend, "Pine-top Inn."  Here he took his
+leave, receiving the cordial thanks of the two for his attentions, the
+Colonel remarking that he thought they would spend the remainder of the
+day in rest, and take a look at his purchase on the morrow.
+
+J. Pinkney Bloom walked down Cold Branch's main street.  He did not
+know this town, but he knew towns, and his feet did not falter.
+Presently he saw a sign over a door:  "Frank E. Cooly, Attorney-at-Law
+and Notary Public."  A young man was Mr. Cooly, and awaiting business.
+
+"Get your hat, son," said Mr. Bloom, in his breezy way, "and a blank
+deed, and come along.  It's a job for you."
+
+"Now," he continued, when Mr. Cooly had responded with alacrity, "is
+there a bookstore in town?"
+
+"One," said the lawyer.  "Henry Williams's."
+
+"Get there," said Mr. Bloom.  "We're going to buy it."
+
+Henry Williams was behind his counter.  His store was a small one,
+containing a mixture of books, stationery, and fancy rubbish. Adjoining
+it was Henry's home--a decent cottage, vine-embowered and cosy.  Henry
+was lank and soporific, and not inclined to rush his business.
+
+"I want to buy your house and store," said Mr. Bloom.  "I haven't got
+time to dicker--name your price."
+
+"It's worth eight hundred," said Henry, too much dazed to ask more than
+its value.
+
+"Shut that door," said Mr. Bloom to the lawyer.  Then he tore off his
+coat and vest, and began to unbutton his shirt.
+
+"Wanter fight about it, do yer?" said Henry Williams, jumping up and
+cracking his heels together twice.  "All right, hunky--sail in and cut
+yer capers."
+
+"Keep your clothes on," said Mr. Bloom.  "I'm only going down to the
+bank."
+
+He drew eight one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt and planked
+them down on the counter.  Mr. Cooly showed signs of future promise,
+for he already had the deed spread out, and was reaching across the
+counter for the ink bottle.  Never before or since was such quick
+action had in Cold Branch.
+
+"Your name, please?" asked the lawyer.
+
+"Make it out to Peyton Blaylock," said Mr. Bloom.  "God knows how to
+spell it."
+
+Within thirty minutes Henry Williams was out of business, and Mr. Bloom
+stood on the brick sidewalk with Mr. Cooly, who held in his hand the
+signed and attested deed.
+
+"You'll find the party at the Pinetop Inn," said J. Pinkney Bloom. "Get
+it recorded, and take it down and give it to him.  He'll ask you a
+hell's mint of questions; so here's ten dollars for the trouble you'll
+have in not being able to answer 'em.  Never run much to poetry, did
+you, young man?"
+
+"Well," said the really talented Cooly, who even yet retained his right
+mind, "now and then."
+
+"Dig into it," said Mr. Bloom, "it'll pay you.  Never heard a poem,
+now, that run something like this, did you?--
+
+  A good thing out of Nazareth
+    Comes up sometimes, I guess,
+  On hand, all right, to help and cheer
+    A sucker in distress."
+
+"I believe not," said Mr. Cooly.
+
+"It's a hymn," said J. Pinkney Bloom.  "Now, show me the way to a
+livery stable, son, for I'm going to hit the dirt road back to Okochee."
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A HUMORIST
+
+There was a painless stage of incubation that lasted twenty-five years,
+and then it broke out on me, and people said I was It.
+
+But they called it humor instead of measles.
+
+The employees in the store bought a silver inkstand for the senior
+partner on his fiftieth birthday.  We crowded into his private office
+to present it.  I had been selected for spokesman, and I made a little
+speech that I had been preparing for a week.
+
+It made a hit.  It was full of puns and epigrams and funny twists that
+brought down the house--which was a very solid one in the wholesale
+hardware line.  Old Marlowe himself actually grinned, and the employees
+took their cue and roared.
+
+My reputation as a humorist dates from half-past nine o'clock on that
+morning.  For weeks afterward my fellow clerks fanned the flame of my
+self-esteem.  One by one they came to me, saying what an awfully clever
+speech that was, old man, and carefully explained to me the point of
+each one of my jokes.
+
+Gradually I found that I was expected to keep it up.  Others might
+speak sanely on business matters and the day's topics, but from me
+something gamesome and airy was required.
+
+I was expected to crack jokes about the crockery and lighten up the
+granite ware with persiflage.  I was second bookkeeper, and if I failed
+to show up a balance sheet without something comic about the footings
+or could find no cause for laughter in an invoice of plows, the other
+clerks were disappointed.  By degrees my fame spread, and I became a
+local "character."  Our town was small enough to make this possible.
+The daily newspaper quoted me.  At social gatherings I was
+indispensable.
+
+I believe I did possess considerable wit and a facility for quick and
+spontaneous repartee.  This gift I cultivated and improved by practice.
+And the nature of it was kindly and genial, not running to sarcasm or
+offending others.  People began to smile when they saw me coming, and
+by the time we had met I generally had the word ready to broaden the
+smile into a laugh.
+
+I had married early.  We had a charming boy of three and a girl of
+five.  Naturally, we lived in a vine-covered cottage, and were happy.
+My salary as bookkeeper in the hardware concern kept at a distance
+those ills attendant upon superfluous wealth.
+
+At sundry times I had written out a few jokes and conceits that I
+considered peculiarly happy, and had sent them to certain periodicals
+that print such things.  All of them had been instantly accepted.
+Several of the editors had written to request further contributions.
+
+One day I received a letter from the editor of a famous weekly
+publication.  He suggested that I submit to him a humorous composition
+to fill a column of space; hinting that he would make it a regular
+feature of each issue if the work proved satisfactory.  I did so, and
+at the end of two weeks he offered to make a contract with me for a
+year at a figure that was considerably higher than the amount paid me
+by the hardware firm.
+
+I was filled with delight.  My wife already crowned me in her mind with
+the imperishable evergreens of literary success.  We had lobster
+croquettes and a bottle of blackberry wine for supper that night. Here
+was the chance to liberate myself from drudgery.  I talked over the
+matter very seriously with Louisa.  We agreed that I must resign my
+place at the store and devote myself to humor.
+
+I resigned.  My fellow clerks gave me a farewell banquet.  The speech I
+made there coruscated.  It was printed in full by the Gazette.  The
+next morning I awoke and looked at the clock.
+
+"Late, by George!" I exclaimed, and grabbed for my clothes.  Louisa
+reminded me that I was no longer a slave to hardware and contractors'
+supplies.  I was now a professional humorist.
+
+After breakfast she proudly led me to the little room off the kitchen.
+Dear girl!   There was my table and chair, writing pad, ink, and pipe
+tray.  And all the author's trappings--the celery stand full of fresh
+roses and honeysuckle, last year's calendar on the wall, the
+dictionary, and a little bag of chocolates to nibble between
+inspirations.  Dear girl!
+
+I sat me to work.  The wall paper is patterned with arabesques or
+odalisks or--perhaps--it is trapezoids.  Upon one of the figures I
+fixed my eyes.  I bethought me of humor.
+
+A voice startled me--Louisa's voice.
+
+"If you aren't too busy, dear," it said, "come to dinner."
+
+I looked at my watch.  Yes, five hours had been gathered in by the grim
+scytheman.  I went to dinner.
+
+"You mustn't work too hard at first," said Louisa.  "Goethe--or was it
+Napoleon?--said five hours a day is enough for mental labor.  Couldn't
+you take me and the children to the woods this afternoon?"
+
+"I am a little tired," I admitted.  So we went to the woods.
+
+But I soon got the swing of it.  Within a month I was turning out copy
+as regular as shipments of hardware.
+
+And I had success.  My column in the weekly made some stir, and I was
+referred to in a gossipy way by the critics as something fresh in the
+line of humorists.  I augmented my income considerably by contributing
+to other publications.
+
+I picked up the tricks of the trade.  I could take a funny idea and
+make a two-line joke of it, earning a dollar.  With false whiskers on,
+it would serve up cold as a quatrain, doubling its producing value.  By
+turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly
+recognize it as _vers de societe_ with neatly shod feet and a
+fashion-plate illustration.
+
+I began to save up money, and we had new carpets, and a parlor organ.
+My townspeople began to look upon me as a citizen of some consequence
+instead of the merry trifler I had been when I clerked in the hardware
+store.
+
+After five or six months the spontaniety seemed to depart from my
+humor.  Quips and droll sayings no longer fell carelessly from my lips.
+I was sometimes hard run for material.  I found myself listening to
+catch available ideas from the conversation of my friends.  Sometimes I
+chewed my pencil and gazed at the wall paper for hours trying to build
+up some gay little bubble of unstudied fun.
+
+And then I became a harpy, a Moloch, a Jonah, a vampire, to my
+acquaintances.  Anxious, haggard, greedy, I stood among them like a
+veritable killjoy.  Let a bright saying, a witty comparison, a piquant
+phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound springing
+upon a bone.  I dared not trust my memory; but, turning aside guiltily
+and meanly, I would make a note of it in my ever-present memorandum
+book or upon my cuff for my own future use.
+
+My friends regarded me in sorrow and wonder. I was not the same man.
+Where once I had furnished them entertainment and jollity, I now preyed
+upon them.  No jests from me ever bid for their smiles now. They were
+too precious.  I could not afford to dispense gratuitously the means of
+my livelihood.
+
+I was a lugubrious fox praising the singing of my friends, the crow's,
+that they might drop from their beaks the morsels of wit that I coveted.
+
+Nearly every one began to avoid me.  I even forgot how to smile, not
+even paying that much for the sayings I appropriated.
+
+No persons, places, times, or subjects were exempt from my plundering
+in search of material.  Even in church my demoralized fancy went
+hunting among the solemn aisles and pillars for spoil.
+
+Did the minister give out the long-meter doxology, at once I began:
+"Doxology--sockdology--sockdolager--meter--meet her."
+
+The sermon ran through my mental sieve, its precepts filtering
+unheeded, could I but glean a suggestion of a pun or a _bon mot_. The
+solemnest anthems of the choir were but an accompaniment to my thoughts
+as I conceived new changes to ring upon the ancient comicalities
+concerning the jealousies of soprano, tenor, and basso.
+
+My own home became a hunting ground.  My wife is a singularly feminine
+creature, candid, sympathetic, and impulsive.  Once her conversation
+was my delight, and her ideas a source of unfailing pleasure.  Now I
+worked her.  She was a gold mine of those amusing but lovable
+inconsistencies that distinguish the female mind.
+
+I began to market those pearls of unwisdom and humor that should have
+enriched only the sacred precincts of home.  With devilish cunning I
+encouraged her to talk.  Unsuspecting, she laid her heart bare.  Upon
+the cold, conspicuous, common, printed page I offered it to the public
+gaze.
+
+A literary Judas, I kissed her and betrayed her.  For pieces of silver
+I dressed her sweet confidences in the pantalettes and frills of folly
+and made them dance in the market place.
+
+Dear Louisa!  Of nights I have bent over her cruel as a wolf above a
+tender lamb, hearkening even to her soft words murmured in sleep,
+hoping to catch an idea for my next day's grind.  There is worse to
+come.
+
+God help me!  Next my fangs were buried deep in the neck of the
+fugitive sayings of my little children.
+
+Guy and Viola were two bright fountains of childish, quaint thoughts
+and speeches.  I found a ready sale for this kind of humor, and was
+furnishing a regular department in a magazine with "Funny Fancies of
+Childhood."  I began to stalk them as an Indian stalks the antelope. I
+would hide behind sofas and doors, or crawl on my hands and knees among
+the bushes in the yard to eavesdrop while they were at play. I had all
+the qualities of a harpy except remorse.
+
+Once, when I was barren of ideas, and my copy must leave in the next
+mail, I covered myself in a pile of autumn leaves in the yard, where I
+knew they intended to come to play.  I cannot bring myself to believe
+that Guy was aware of my hiding place, but even if he was, I would be
+loath to blame him for his setting fire to the leaves, causing the
+destruction of my new suit of clothes, and nearly cremating a parent.
+
+Soon my own children began to shun me as a pest.  Often, when I was
+creeping upon them like a melancholy ghoul, I would hear them say to
+each other:  "Here comes papa," and they would gather their toys and
+scurry away to some safer hiding place.  Miserable wretch that I was!
+
+And yet I was doing well financially.  Before the first year had passed
+I had saved a thousand dollars, and we had lived in comfort.
+
+But at what a cost!  I am not quite clear as to what a pariah is, but I
+was everything that it sounds like.  I had no friends, no amusements,
+no enjoyment of life.  The happiness of my family had been sacrificed.
+I was a bee, sucking sordid honey from life's fairest flowers, dreaded
+and shunned on account of my stingo.
+
+One day a man spoke to me, with a pleasant and friendly smile. Not in
+months had the thing happened.  I was passing the undertaking
+establishment of Peter Heffelbower.  Peter stood in the door and
+saluted me.  I stopped, strangely wrung in my heart by his greeting. He
+asked me inside.
+
+The day was chill and rainy.  We went into the back room, where a fire
+burned, in a little stove.  A customer came, and Peter left me alone
+for a while.  Presently I felt a new feeling stealing over me--a sense
+of beautiful calm and content, I looked around the place. There were
+rows of shining rosewood caskets, black palls, trestles, hearse plumes,
+mourning streamers, and all the paraphernalia of the solemn trade.
+Here was peace, order, silence, the abode of grave and dignified
+reflections.  Here, on the brink of life, was a little niche pervaded
+by the spirit of eternal rest.
+
+When I entered it, the follies of the world abandoned me at the door. I
+felt no inclination to wrest a humorous idea from those sombre and
+stately trappings.  My mind seemed to stretch itself to grateful repose
+upon a couch draped with gentle thoughts.
+
+A quarter of an hour ago I was an abandoned humorist.  Now I was a
+philosopher, full of serenity and ease.  I had found a refuge from
+humor, from the hot chase of the shy quip, from the degrading pursuit
+of the panting joke, from the restless reach after the nimble repartee.
+
+I had not known Heffelbower well.  When he came back, I let him talk,
+fearful that he might prove to be a jarring note in the sweet,
+dirgelike harmony of his establishment.
+
+But, no.  He chimed truly.  I gave a long sigh of happiness.  Never
+have I known a man's talk to be as magnificently dull as Peter's was.
+Compared with it the Dead Sea is a geyser.  Never a sparkle or a
+glimmer of wit marred his words.  Commonplaces as trite and as
+plentiful as blackberries flowed from his lips no more stirring in
+quality than a last week's tape running from a ticker.  Quaking a
+little, I tried upon him one of my best pointed jokes.  It fell back
+ineffectual, with the point broken.  I loved that man from then on.
+
+Two or three evenings each week I would steal down to Heffelbower's and
+revel in his back room.  That was my only joy.  I began to rise early
+and hurry through my work, that I might spend more time in my haven.
+In no other place could I throw off my habit of extracting humorous
+ideas from my surroundings.  Peter's talk left me no opening had I
+besieged it ever so hard.
+
+Under this influence I began to improve in spirits.  It was the
+recreation from one's labor which every man needs.  I surprised one or
+two of my former friends by throwing them a smile and a cheery word as
+I passed them on the streets.  Several times I dumfounded my family by
+relaxing long enough to make a jocose remark in their presence.
+
+I had so long been ridden by the incubus of humor that I seized my
+hours of holiday with a schoolboy's zest.
+
+Mv work began to suffer.  It was not the pain and burden to me that it
+had been.  I often whistled at my desk, and wrote with far more fluency
+than before.  I accomplished my tasks impatiently, as anxious to be off
+to my helpful retreat as a drunkard is to get to his tavern.
+
+My wife had some anxious hours in conjecturing where I spent my
+afternoons.  I thought it best not to tell her; women do not understand
+these things.  Poor girl!--she had one shock out of it.
+
+One day I brought home a silver coffin handle for a paper weight and a
+fine, fluffy hearse plume to dust my papers with.
+
+I loved to see them on my desk, and think of the beloved back room down
+at Heffelbower's.  But Louisa found them, and she shrieked with horror.
+I had to console her with some lame excuse for having them, but I saw
+in her eyes that the prejudice was not removed.  I had to remove the
+articles, though, at double-quick time.
+
+One day Peter Heffelbower laid before me a temptation that swept me off
+my feet.  In his sensible, uninspired way he showed me his books, and
+explained that his profits and his business were increasing rapidly.
+He had thought of taking in a partner with some cash.  He would rather
+have me than any one he knew.  When I left his place that afternoon
+Peter had my check for the thousand dollars I had in the bank, and I
+was a partner in his undertaking business.
+
+I went home with feelings of delirious joy, mingled with a certain
+amount of doubt.  I was dreading to tell my wife about it.  But I
+walked on air.  To give up the writing of humorous stuff, once more to
+enjoy the apples of life, instead of squeezing them to a pulp for a few
+drops of hard cider to make the pubic feel funny--what a boon that
+would be!
+
+At the supper table Louisa handed me some letters that had come during
+my absence.  Several of them contained rejected manuscript.  Ever since
+I first began going to Heffelbower's my stuff had been coming back with
+alarming frequency.  Lately I had been dashing off my jokes and
+articles with the greatest fluency.  Previously I had labored like a
+bricklayer, slowly and with agony.
+
+Presently I opened a letter from the editor of the weekly with which I
+had a regular contract.  The checks for that weekly article were still
+our main dependence.  The letter ran thus:
+
+
+DEAR SIR:
+
+As you are aware, our contract for the year expires with the present
+month.  While regretting the necessity for so doing, we must say that
+we do not care to renew same for the coming year.  We were quite
+pleased with your style of humor, which seems to have delighted quite a
+large proportion of our readers.  But for the past two months we have
+noticed a decided falling off in its quality.  Your earlier work showed
+a spontaneous, easy, natural flow of fun and wit.  Of late it is
+labored, studied, and unconvincing, giving painful evidence of hard
+toil and drudging mechanism.
+
+Again regretting that we do not consider your contributions available
+any longer, we are, yours sincerely,
+
+THE EDITOR.
+
+
+I handed this letter to my wife.  After she had read it her face grew
+extremely long, and there were tears in her eyes.
+
+"The mean old thing!" she exclaimed indignantly.  "I'm sure your pieces
+are just as good as they ever were.  And it doesn't take you half as
+long to write them as it did."  And then, I suppose, Louisa thought of
+the checks that would cease coming.  "Oh, John," she wailed, "what will
+you do now?"
+
+For an answer I got up and began to do a polka step around the supper
+table.  I am sure Louisa thought the trouble had driven me mad; and I
+think the children hoped it had, for they tore after me, yelling with
+glee and emulating my steps.  I was now something like their old
+playmate as of yore.
+
+"The theatre for us to-night!" I shouted; "nothing less.  And a late,
+wild, disreputable supper for all of us at the Palace Restaurant.
+Lumpty-diddle-de-dee-de-dum!"
+
+And then I explained my glee by declaring that I was now a partner in a
+prosperous undertaking establishment, and that written jokes might go
+hide their heads in sackcloth and ashes for all me.
+
+With the editor's letter in her hand to justify the deed I had done, my
+wife could advance no objections save a few mild ones based on the
+feminine inability to appreciate a good thing such as the little back
+room of Peter Hef--no, of Heffelbower & Co's. undertaking establishment.
+
+In conclusion, I will say that to-day you will find no man in our town
+as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I.  My jokes are
+again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife's
+confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola
+play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the
+ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook in hand.
+
+Our business has prospered finely. I keep the books and look after the
+shop, while Peter attends to outside matters.  He says that my levity
+and high spirits would simply turn any funeral into a regular Irish
+wake.
+
+
+
+THE SPARROWS IN MADISON SQUARE
+
+The young man in straitened circumstances who comes to New York City to
+enter literature has but one thing to do, provided he has studied
+carefully his field in advance.  He must go straight to Madison Square,
+write an article about the sparrows there, and sell it to the _Sun_ for
+$15.
+
+I cannot recall either a novel or a story dealing with the popular
+theme of the young writer from the provinces who comes to the
+metropolis to win fame and fortune with his pen in which the hero does
+not get his start that way.  It does seem strange that some author, in
+casting about for startlingly original plots, has not hit upon the idea
+of having his hero write about the bluebirds in Union Square and sell
+it to the _Herald_.  But a search through the files of metropolitan
+fiction counts up overwhelmingly for the sparrows and the old Garden
+Square, and the _Sun_ always writes the check.
+
+Of course it is easy to understand why this first city venture of the
+budding author is always successful.  He is primed by necessity to a
+superlative effort; mid the iron and stone and marble of the roaring
+city he has found this spot of singing birds and green grass and trees;
+every tender sentiment in his nature is baffling with the sweet pain of
+homesickness; his genius is aroused as it never may be again; the birds
+chirp, the tree branches sway, the noise of wheels is forgotten; he
+writes with his soul in his pen--and he sells it to the _Sun_ for $15.
+
+I had read of this custom during many years before I came to New York.
+When my friends were using their strongest arguments to dissuade me
+from coming, I only smiled serenely.  They did not know of that sparrow
+graft I had up my sleeve.
+
+When I arrived in New York, and the car took me straight from the ferry
+up Twenty-third Street to Madison Square, I could hear that $15 check
+rustling in my inside pocket.
+
+I obtained lodging at an unhyphenated hostelry, and the next morning I
+was on a bench in Madison Square almost by the time the sparrows were
+awake.  Their melodious chirping, the benignant spring foliage of the
+noble trees and the clean, fragrant grass reminded me so potently of
+the old farm I had left that tears almost came into my eyes.
+
+Then, all in a moment, I felt my inspiration.  The brave, piercing
+notes of those cheerful small birds formed a keynote to a wonderful,
+light, fanciful song of hope and joy and altruism.  Like myself, they
+were creatures with hearts pitched to the tune of woods and fields; as
+I was, so were they captives by circumstance in the discordant, dull
+city--yet with how much grace and glee they bore the restraint!
+
+And then the early morning people began to pass through the square to
+their work--sullen people, with sidelong glances and glum faces,
+hurrying, hurrying, hurrying.  And I got my theme cut out clear from
+the bird notes, and wrought it into a lesson, and a poem, and a
+carnival dance, and a lullaby; and then translated it all into prose
+and began to write.
+
+For two hours my pencil traveled over my pad with scarcely a rest. Then
+I went to the little room I had rented for two days, and there I cut it
+to half, and then mailed it, white-hot, to the _Sun_.
+
+The next morning I was up by daylight and spent two cents of my capital
+for a paper.  If the word "sparrow" was in it I was unable to find it.
+I took it up to my room and spread it out on the bed and went over it,
+column by column.  Something was wrong.
+
+Three hours afterward the postman brought me a large envelope
+containing my MS. and a piece of inexpensive paper, about 3 inches by
+4--I suppose some of you have seen them--upon which was written in
+violet ink, "With the _Sun's_ thanks."
+
+I went over to the square and sat upon a bench.  No; I did not think it
+necessary to eat any breakfast that morning.  The confounded pests of
+sparrows were making the square hideous with their idiotic "cheep,
+cheep."  I never saw birds so persistently noisy, impudent, and
+disagreeable in all my life.
+
+By this time, according to all traditions, I should have been standing
+in the office of the editor of the _Sun_.  That personage--a tall,
+grave, white-haired man--would strike a silver bell as he grasped my
+hand and wiped a suspicious moisture from his glasses.
+
+"Mr. McChesney," he would be saying when a subordinate appeared, "this
+is Mr. Henry, the young man who sent in that exquisite gem about the
+sparrows in Madison Square.  You may give him a desk at once.  Your
+salary, sir, will be $80 a week, to begin with."
+
+This was what I had been led to expect by all writers who have evolved
+romances of literary New York.
+
+Something was decidedly wrong with tradition.  I could not assume the
+blame, so I fixed it upon the sparrows.  I began to hate them with
+intensity and heat.
+
+At that moment an individual wearing an excess of whiskers, two hats,
+and a pestilential air slid into the seat beside me.
+
+"Say, Willie," he muttered cajolingly, "could you cough up a dime out
+of your coffers for a cup of coffee this morning?"
+
+"I'm lung-weary, my friend," said I.  "The best I can do is three
+cents."
+
+"And you look like a gentleman, too," said he.  "What brung you
+down?--boozer?"
+
+"Birds," I said fiercely.  "The brown-throated songsters carolling
+songs of hope and cheer to weary man toiling amid the city's dust and
+din.  The little feathered couriers from the meadows and woods chirping
+sweetly to us of blue skies and flowering fields.  The confounded
+little squint-eyed nuisances yawping like a flock of steam pianos, and
+stuffing themselves like aldermen with grass seeds and bugs, while a
+man sits on a bench and goes without his breakfast. Yes, sir, birds!
+look at them!"
+
+As I spoke I picked up a dead tree branch that lay by the bench, and
+hurled it with all my force into a close congregation of the sparrows
+on the grass.  The flock flew to the trees with a babel of shrill
+cries; but two of them remained prostrate upon the turf.
+
+In a moment my unsavory friend had leaped over the row of benches and
+secured the fluttering victims, which he thrust hurriedly into his
+pockets.  Then he beckoned me with a dirty forefinger.
+
+"Come on, cully," he said hoarsely.  "You're in on the feed."
+
+Thank you very much!
+
+Weakly I followed my dingy acquaintance.  He led me away from the park
+down a side street and through a crack in a fence into a vacant lot
+where some excavating had been going on.  Behind a pile of old stones
+and lumber he paused, and took out his birds.
+
+"I got matches," said he.  "You got any paper to start a fire with?"
+
+I drew forth my manuscript story of the sparrows, and offered it for
+burnt sacrifice.  There were old planks, splinters, and chips for our
+fire.  My frowsy friend produced from some interior of his frayed
+clothing half a loaf of bread, pepper, and salt.
+
+In ten minutes each of us was holding a sparrow spitted upon a stick
+over the leaping flames.
+
+"Say," said my fellow bivouacker, "this ain't so bad when a fellow's
+hungry.  It reminds me of when I struck New York first--about fifteen
+years ago.  I come in from the West to see if I could get a job on a
+newspaper.  I hit the Madison Square Park the first mornin' after, and
+was sitting around on the benches.  I noticed the sparrows chirpin',
+and the grass and trees so nice and green that I thought I was back in
+the country again.  Then I got some papers out of my pocket, and--"
+
+"I know," I interrupted.  "You sent it to the _Sun_ and got $15."
+
+"Say," said my friend, suspiciously, "you seem to know a good deal.
+Where was you?  I went to sleep on the bench there, in the sun, and
+somebody touched me for every cent I had--$15."
+
+
+
+HEARTS AND HANDS
+
+At Denver there was an influx of passengers into the coaches on the
+eastbound B. & M. express.  In one coach there sat a very pretty young
+woman dressed in elegant taste and surrounded by all the luxurious
+comforts of an experienced traveler.  Among the newcomers were two
+young men, one of handsome presence with a bold, frank countenance and
+manner; the other a ruffled, glum-faced person, heavily built and
+roughly dressed.  The two were handcuffed together.
+
+As they passed down the aisle of the coach the only vacant seat offered
+was a reversed one facing the attractive young woman.  Here the linked
+couple seated themselves.  The young woman's glance fell upon them with
+a distant, swift disinterest; then with a lovely smile brightening her
+countenance and a tender pink tingeing her rounded cheeks, she held out
+a little gray-gloved hand.  When she spoke her voice, full, sweet, and
+deliberate, proclaimed that its owner was accustomed to speak and be
+heard.
+
+"Well, Mr. Easton, if you _will_ make me speak first, I suppose I must.
+Don't you ever recognize old friends when you meet them in the West?"
+
+The younger man roused himself sharply at the sound of her voice,
+seemed to struggle with a slight embarrassment which he threw off
+instantly, and then clasped her fingers with his left hand.
+
+"It's Miss Fairchild," he said, with a smile.  "I'll ask you to excuse
+the other hand; it's otherwise engaged just at present."
+
+He slightly raised his right hand, bound at the wrist by the shining
+"bracelet" to the left one of his companion.  The glad look in the
+girl's eyes slowly changed to a bewildered horror.  The glow faded from
+her cheeks.  Her lips parted in a vague, relaxing distress. Easton,
+with a little laugh, as if amused, was about to speak again when the
+other forestalled him.  The glum-faced man had been watching the girl's
+countenance with veiled glances from his keen, shrewd eyes.
+
+"You'll excuse me for speaking, miss, but, I see you're acquainted with
+the marshall here.  If you'll ask him to speak a word for me when we
+get to the pen he'll do it, and it'll make things easier for me there.
+He's taking me to Leavenworth prison.  It's seven years for
+counterfeiting."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, with a deep breath and returning color.  "So that
+is what you are doing out here?  A marshal!"
+
+"My dear Miss Fairchild," said Easton, calmly, "I had to do something.
+Money has a way of taking wings unto itself, and you know it takes
+money to keep step with our crowd in Washington.  I saw this opening in
+the West, and--well, a marshalship isn't quite as high a position as
+that of ambassador, but--"
+
+"The ambassador," said the girl, warmly, "doesn't call any more.  He
+needn't ever have done so.  You ought to know that.  And so now you are
+one of these dashing Western heroes, and you ride and shoot and go into
+all kinds of dangers.  That's different from the Washington life. You
+have been missed from the old crowd."
+
+The girl's eyes, fascinated, went back, widening a little, to rest upon
+the glittering handcuffs.
+
+"Don't you worry about them, miss," said the other man.  "All marshals
+handcuff themselves to their prisoners to keep them from getting away.
+Mr. Easton knows his business."
+
+"Will we see you again soon in Washington?" asked the girl.
+
+"Not soon, I think," said Easton.  "My butterfly days are over, I fear."
+
+"I love the West," said the girl irrelevantly.  Her eyes were shining
+softly.  She looked away out the car window.  She began to speak truly
+and simply without the gloss of style and manner: "Mamma and I spent
+the summer in Denver.  She went home a week ago because father was
+slightly ill.  I could live and be happy in the West.  I think the air
+here agrees with me.  Money isn't everything. But people always
+misunderstand things and remain stupid--"
+
+"Say, Mr. Marshal," growled the glum-faced man.  "This isn't quite
+fair.  I'm needing a drink, and haven't had a smoke all day.  Haven't
+you talked long enough?  Take me in the smoker now, won't you?  I'm
+half dead for a pipe."
+
+The bound travelers rose to their feet, Easton with the same slow smile
+on his face.
+
+"I can't deny a petition for tobacco," he said, lightly.  "It's the one
+friend of the unfortunate.  Good-bye, Miss Fairchild.  Duty calls, you
+know."  He held out his hand for a farewell.
+
+"It's too bad you are not going East," she said, reclothing herself
+with manner and style.  "But you must go on to Leavenworth, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes," said Easton, "I must go on to Leavenworth."
+
+The two men sidled down the aisle into the smoker.
+
+The two passengers in a seat near by had heard most of the
+conversation.  Said one of them:  "That marshal's a good sort of chap.
+Some of these Western fellows are all right."
+
+"Pretty young to hold an office like that, isn't he?" asked the other.
+
+"Young!" exclaimed the first speaker, "why--Oh! didn't you catch on?
+Say--did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his _right_
+hand?"
+
+
+
+THE CACTUS
+
+The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A
+large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the
+drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire
+courtship while removing one's gloves.
+
+That is what Trysdale was doing, standing by a table in his bachelor
+apartments.  On the table stood a singular-looking green plant in a red
+earthen jar.  The plant was one of the species of cacti, and was
+provided with long, tentacular leaves that perpetually swayed with the
+slightest breeze with a peculiar beckoning motion.
+
+Trysdale's friend, the brother of the bride, stood at a sideboard
+complaining at being allowed to drink alone.  Both men were in evening
+dress.  White favors like stars upon their coats shone through the
+gloom of the apartment.
+
+As he slowly unbuttoned his gloves, there passed through Trysdale's
+mind a swift, scarifying retrospect of the last few hours.  It seemed
+that in his nostrils was still the scent of the flowers that had been
+banked in odorous masses about the church, and in his ears the
+lowpitched hum of a thousand well-bred voices, the rustle of crisp
+garments, and, most insistently recurring, the drawling words of the
+minister irrevocably binding her to another.
+
+From this last hopeless point of view he still strove, as if it had
+become a habit of his mind, to reach some conjecture as to why and how
+he had lost her.  Shaken rudely by the uncompromising fact, he had
+suddenly found himself confronted by a thing he had never before
+faced--his own innermost, unmitigated, arid unbedecked self.   He saw
+all the garbs of pretence and egoism that he had worn now turn to rags
+of folly.  He shuddered at the thought that to others, before now, the
+garments of his soul must have appeared sorry and threadbare. Vanity
+and conceit?  These were the joints in his armor.  And how free from
+either she had always been--But why--
+
+As she had slowly moved up the aisle toward the altar he had felt an
+unworthy, sullen exultation that had served to support him.  He had
+told himself that her paleness was from thoughts of another than the
+man to whom she was about to give herself.  But even that poor
+consolation had been wrenched from him.  For, when he saw that swift,
+limpid, upward look that she gave the man when he took her hand, he
+knew himself to be forgotten.  Once that same look had been raised to
+him, and he had gauged its meaning.  Indeed, his conceit had crumbled;
+its last prop was gone.  Why had it ended thus?  There had been no
+quarrel between them, nothing--
+
+For the thousandth time he remarshalled in his mind the events of those
+last few days before the tide had so suddenly turned.
+
+She had always insisted upon placing him upon a pedestal, and he had
+accepted her homage with royal grandeur.  It had been a very sweet
+incense that she had burned before him; so modest (he told himself); so
+childlike and worshipful, and (he would once have sworn) so sincere.
+She had invested him with an almost supernatural number of high
+attributes and excellencies and talents, and he had absorbed the
+oblation as a desert drinks the rain that can coax from it no promise
+of blossom or fruit.
+
+As Trysdale grimly wrenched apart the seam of his last glove, the
+crowning instance of his fatuous and tardily mourned egoism came
+vividly back to him.  The scene was the night when he had asked her to
+come up on his pedestal with him and share his greatness.  He could
+not, now, for the pain of it, allow his mind to dwell upon the memory
+of her convincing beauty that night--the careless wave of her hair, the
+tenderness and virginal charm of her looks and words.  But they had
+been enough, and they had brought him to speak.  During their
+conversation she had said:
+
+"And Captain Carruthers tells me that you speak the Spanish language
+like a native.  Why have you hidden this accomplishment from me?  Is
+there anything you do not know?"
+
+Now, Carruthers was an idiot.  No doubt he (Trysdale) had been guilty
+(he sometimes did such things) of airing at the club some old, canting
+Castilian proverb dug from the hotchpotch at the back of dictionaries.
+Carruthers, who was one of his incontinent admirers, was the very man
+to have magnified this exhibition of doubtful erudition.
+
+But, alas! the incense of her admiration had been so sweet and
+flattering.  He allowed the imputation to pass without denial. Without
+protest, he allowed her to twine about his brow this spurious bay of
+Spanish scholarship.  He let it grace his conquering head, and, among
+its soft convolutions, he did not feel the prick of the thorn that was
+to pierce him later.
+
+How glad, how shy, how tremulous she was!  How she fluttered like a
+snared bird when he laid his mightiness at her feet!  He could have
+sworn, and he could swear now, that unmistakable consent was in her
+eyes, but, coyly, she would give him no direct answer.  "I will send
+you my answer to-morrow," she said; and he, the indulgent, confident
+victor, smilingly granted the delay.  The next day he waited,
+impatient, in his rooms for the word.  At noon her groom came to the
+door and left the strange cactus in the red earthen jar.  There was no
+note, no message, merely a tag upon the plant bearing a barbarous
+foreign or botanical name.  He waited until night, but her answer did
+not come.  His large pride and hurt vanity kept him from seeking her.
+Two evenings later they met at a dinner.  Their greetings were
+conventional, but she looked at him, breathless, wondering, eager. He
+was courteous, adamant, waiting her explanation.  With womanly
+swiftness she took her cue from his manner, and turned to snow and ice.
+Thus, and wider from this on, they had drifted apart.  Where was his
+fault?  Who had been to blame?  Humbled now, he sought the answer amid
+the ruins of his self-conceit.  If--
+
+The voice of the other man in the room, querulously intruding upon his
+thoughts, aroused him.
+
+"I say, Trysdale, what the deuce is the matter with you?  You look
+unhappy as if you yourself had been married instead of having acted
+merely as an accomplice.  Look at me, another accessory, come two
+thousand miles on a garlicky, cockroachy banana steamer all the way
+from South America to connive at the sacrifice--please to observe how
+lightly my guilt rests upon my shoulders.  Only little sister I had,
+too, and now she's gone.  Come now! take something to ease your
+conscience."
+
+"I don't drink just now, thanks," said Trysdale.
+
+"Your brandy," resumed the other, coming over and joining him, "is
+abominable.  Run down to see me some time at Punta Redonda, and try
+some of our stuff that old Garcia smuggles in.  It's worth the trip.
+Hallo! here's an old acquaintance.  Wherever did you rake up this
+cactus, Trysdale?"
+
+"A present," said Trysdale, "from a friend.  Know the species?"
+
+"Very well.  It's a tropical concern.  See hundreds of 'em around Punta
+every day.  Here's the name on this tag tied to it.  Know any Spanish,
+Trysdale?"
+
+"No," said Trysdale, with the bitter wraith of a smile--"Is it Spanish?"
+
+"Yes.  The natives imagine the leaves are reaching out and beckoning to
+you.  They call it by this name--Ventomarme. Name means in English,
+'Come and take me.'"
+
+
+
+THE DETECTIVE DETECTOR
+
+I was walking in Central Park with Avery Knight, the great New York
+burglar, highwayman, and murderer.
+
+"But, my dear Knight," said I, "it sounds incredible.  You have
+undoubtedly performed some of the most wonderful feats in your
+profession known to modern crime.  You have committed some marvellous
+deeds under the very noses of the police--you have boldly entered the
+homes of millionaires and held them up with an empty gun while you made
+free with their silver and jewels; you have sandbagged citizens in the
+glare of Broadway's electric lights; you have killed and robbed with
+superb openness and absolute impunity--but when you boast that within
+forty-eight hours after committing a murder you can run down and
+actually bring me face to face with the detective assigned to apprehend
+you, I must beg leave to express my doubts--remember, you are in New
+York."
+
+Avery Knight smiled indulgently.
+
+"You pique my professional pride, doctor," he said in a nettled tone.
+"I will convince you."
+
+About twelve yards in advance of us a prosperous-looking citizen was
+rounding a clump of bushes where the walk curved.  Knight suddenly drew
+a revolver and shot the man in the back.  His victim fell and lay
+without moving.
+
+The great murderer went up to him leisurely and took from his clothes
+his money, watch, and a valuable ring and cravat pin.  He then rejoined
+me smiling calmly, and we continued our walk.
+
+Ten steps and we met a policeman running toward the spot where the shot
+had been fired.  Avery Knight stopped him.
+
+"I have just killed a man," he announced, seriously, "and robbed him of
+his possessions."
+
+"G'wan," said the policeman, angrily, "or I'll run yez in!  Want yer
+name in the papers, don't yez?  I never knew the cranks to come around
+so quick after a shootin' before.  Out of th' park, now, for yours, or
+I'll fan yez."
+
+"What you have done," I said, argumentatively, as Knight and I walked
+on, "was easy.  But when you come to the task of hunting down the
+detective that they send upon your trail you will find that you have
+undertaken a difficult feat."
+
+"Perhaps so," said Knight, lightly.  "I will admit that my success
+depends in a degree upon the sort of man they start after me.  If it
+should be an ordinary plain-clothes man I might fail to gain a sight of
+him.  If they honor me by giving the case to some one of their
+celebrated sleuths I do not fear to match my cunning and powers of
+induction against his."
+
+On the next afternoon Knight entered my office with a satisfied look on
+his keen countenance.
+
+"How goes the mysterious murder?" I asked.
+
+"As usual," said Knight, smilingly. "I have put in the morning at the
+police station and at the inquest.  It seems that a card case of mine
+containing cards with my name and address was found near the body. They
+have three witnesses who saw the shooting and gave a description of me.
+The case has been placed in the hands of Shamrock Jolnes, the famous
+detective.  He left Headquarters at 11:30 on the assignment. I waited
+at my address until two, thinking he might call there."
+
+I laughed, tauntingly.
+
+"You will never see Jolnes," I continued, "until this murder has been
+forgotten, two or three weeks from now.  I had a better opinion of your
+shrewdness, Knight.  During the three hours and a half that you waited
+he has got out of your ken.  He is after you on true induction theories
+now, and no wrongdoer has yet been known to come upon him while thus
+engaged.  I advise you to give it up."
+
+"Doctor," said Knight, with a sudden glint in his keen gray eye and a
+squaring of his chin, "in spite of the record your city holds of
+something like a dozen homicides without a subsequent meeting of the
+perpetrator, and the sleuth in charge of the case, I will undertake to
+break that record.  To-morrow I will take you to Shamrock Jolnes--I
+will unmask him before you and prove to you that it is not an
+impossibility for an officer of the law and a manslayer to stand face
+to face in your city."
+
+"Do it," said I, "and you'll have the sincere thanks of the Police
+Department."
+
+On the next day Knight called for me in a cab.
+
+"I've been on one or two false scents, doctor," he admitted.  "I know
+something of detectives' methods, and I followed out a few of them,
+expecting to find Jolnes at the other end.  The pistol being a
+.45-caliber, I thought surely I would find him at work on the clue in
+Forty-fifth Street.  Then, again, I looked for the detective at the
+Columbia University, as the man's being shot in the back naturally
+suggested hazing.  But I could not find a trace of him."
+
+"--Nor will you," I said, emphatically.
+
+"Not by ordinary methods," said Knight.  "I might walk up and down
+Broadway for a month without success.  But you have aroused my pride,
+doctor; and if I fail to show you Shamrock Jolnes this day, I promise
+you I will never kill or rob in your city again."
+
+"Nonsense, man," I replied.  "When our burglars walk into our houses
+and politely demand, thousands of dollars' worth of jewels, and then
+dine and bang the piano an hour or two before leaving, how do you, a
+mere murderer, expect to come in contact with the detective that is
+looking for you?"
+
+Avery Knight, sat lost in thought for a while.  At length he looked up
+brightly.
+
+"Doc," said he, "I have it.  Put on your hat, and come with me.  In
+half an hour I guarantee that you shall stand in the presence of
+Shamrock Jolnes."
+
+I entered a cab with Avery Knight.  I did not hear his instructions to
+the driver, but the vehicle set out at a smart pace up Broadway,
+turning presently into Fifth Avenue, and proceeding northward again. It
+was with a rapidly beating heart that I accompanied this wonderful and
+gifted assassin, whose analytical genius and superb self-confidence had
+prompted him to make me the tremendous promise of bringing me into the
+presence of a murderer and the New York detective in pursuit of him
+simultaneously.  Even yet I could not believe it possible.
+
+"Are you sure that you are not being led into some trap?" I asked.
+"Suppose that your clue, whatever it is, should bring us only into the
+presence of the Commissioner of Police and a couple of dozen cops!"
+
+"My dear doctor," said Knight, a little stiffly. "I would remind you
+that I am no gambler."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said I.  "But I do not think you will find Jolnes."
+
+The cab stopped before one of the handsomest residences on the avenue.
+Walking up and down in front of the house was a man with long red
+whiskers, with a detective's badge showing on the lapel of his coat.
+Now and then the man would remove his whiskers to wipe his face, and
+then I would recognize at once the well-known features of the great New
+York detective.  Jolnes was keeping a sharp watch upon the doors and
+windows of the house.
+
+"Well, doctor," said Knight, unable to repress a note of triumph in his
+voice, "have you seen?"
+
+"It is wonderful--wonderful!" I could not help exclaiming as our cab
+started on its return trip.  "But how did you do it?  By what process
+of induction--"
+
+"My dear doctor," interrupted the great murderer, "the inductive theory
+is what the detectives use.  My process is more modern.  I call it the
+saltatorial theory.  Without bothering with the tedious mental
+phenomena necessary to the solution of a mystery from slight clues, I
+jump at once to a conclusion.  I will explain to you the method I
+employed in this case.
+
+"In the first place, I argued that as the crime was committed in New
+York City in broad daylight, in a public place and under peculiarly
+atrocious circumstances, and that as the most skilful sleuth available
+was let loose upon the case, the perpetrator would never be discovered.
+Do you not think my postulation justified by precedent?"
+
+"Perhaps so," I replied, doggedly.  "But if Big Bill Dev--"
+
+"Stop that," interrupted Knight, with a smile, "I've heard that several
+times.  It's too late now.  I will proceed.
+
+"If homicides in New York went undiscovered, I reasoned, although the
+best detective talent was employed to ferret them out, it must be true
+that the detectives went about their work in the wrong way. And not
+only in the wrong way, but exactly opposite from the right way.  That
+was my clue.
+
+"I slew the man in Central Park.  Now, let me describe myself to you.
+
+"I am tall, with a black beard, and I hate publicity.  I have no money
+to speak of; I do not like oatmeal, and it is the one ambition of my
+life to die rich.  I am of a cold and heartless disposition.  I do not
+care for my fellowmen and I never give a cent to beggars or charity.
+
+"Now, my dear doctor, that is the true description of myself, the man
+whom that shrewd detective was to hunt down.  You who are familiar with
+the history of crime in New York of late should be able to foretell the
+result.  When I promised you to exhibit to your incredulous gaze the
+sleuth who was set upon me, you laughed at me because you said that
+detectives and murderers never met in New York. I have demonstrated to
+you that the theory is possible."
+
+"But how did you do it?" I asked again.
+
+"It was very simple," replied the distinguished murderer.  "I assumed
+that the detective would go exactly opposite to the clues he had.  I
+have given you a description of myself.  Therefore, he must necessarily
+set to work and trail a short man with a white beard who likes to be in
+the papers, who is very wealthy, is fond 'of oatmeal, wants to die
+poor, and is of an extremely generous and philanthropic disposition.
+When thus far is reached the mind hesitates no longer.  I conveyed you
+at once to the spot where Shamrock Jolnes was piping off Andrew
+Carnegie's residence."
+
+"Knight," said I, "you're a wonder.  If there was no danger of your
+reforming, what a rounds man you'd make for the Nineteenth Precinct!"
+
+
+
+THE DOG AND THE PLAYLET
+
+[This story has been rewritten and published in "Strictly Business"
+under the title, The Proof of the Pudding.]
+
+
+Usually it is a cold day in July when you can stroll up Broadway in
+that month and get a story out of the drama.  I found one a few
+breathless, parboiling days ago, and it seems to decide a serious
+question in art.
+
+There was not a soul left in the city except Hollis and me--and two or
+three million sunworshippers who remained at desks and counters. The
+elect had fled to seashore, lake, and mountain, and had already begun
+to draw for additional funds.  Every evening Hollis and I prowled about
+the deserted town searching for coolness in empty cafes, dining-rooms,
+and roofgardens.  We knew to the tenth part of a revolution the speed
+of every electric fan in Gotham, and we followed the swiftest as they
+varied.  Hollis's fiancee. Miss Loris Sherman, had been in the
+Adirondacks, at Lower Saranac Lake, for a month.  In another week he
+would join her party there.  In the meantime, he cursed the city
+cheerfully and optimistically, and sought my society because I suffered
+him to show me her photograph during the black coffee every time we
+dined together.
+
+My revenge was to read to him my one-act play.
+
+It was one insufferable evening when the overplus of the day's heat was
+being hurled quiveringly back to the heavens by every surcharged brick
+and stone and inch of iron in the panting town.  But with the cunning
+of the two-legged beasts we had found an oasis where the hoofs of
+Apollo's steed had not been allowed to strike.  Our seats were on an
+ocean of cool, polished oak; the white linen of fifty deserted tables
+flapped like seagulls in the artificial breeze; a mile away a waiter
+lingered for a heliographic signal--we might have roared songs there or
+fought a duel without molestation.
+
+Out came Miss Loris's photo with the coffee, and I once more praised
+the elegant poise of the neck, the extremely low-coiled mass of heavy
+hair, and the eyes that followed one, like those in an oil painting.
+
+"She's the greatest ever," said Hollis, with enthusiasm.  "Good as
+Great Northern Preferred, and a disposition built like a watch.  One
+week more and I'll be happy Jonny-on-the-spot.  Old Tom Tolliver, my
+best college chum, went up there two weeks ago.  He writes me that
+Loris doesn't talk about anything but me.  Oh, I guess Rip Van Winkle
+didn't have all the good luck!"
+
+"Yes, yes," said I, hurriedly, pulling out my typewritten play. "She's
+no doubt a charming girl.  Now, here's that little curtain-raiser you
+promised to listen to."
+
+"Ever been tried on the stage?" asked Hollis.
+
+"Not exactly," I answered.  "I read half of it the other day to a
+fellow whose brother knows Robert Edeson; but he had to catch a train
+before I finished."
+
+"Go on," said Hollis, sliding back in his chair like a good fellow.
+"I'm no stage carpenter, but I'll tell you what I think of it from a
+first-row balcony standpoint.  I'm a theatre bug during the season, and
+I can size up a fake play almost as quick as the gallery can. Flag the
+waiter once more, and then go ahead as hard as you like with it.  I'll
+be the dog."
+
+I read my little play lovingly, and, I fear, not without some
+elocution.  There was one scene in it that I believed in greatly. The
+comedy swiftly rises into thrilling and unexpectedly developed drama.
+Capt. Marchmont suddenly becomes cognizant that his wife is an
+unscrupulous adventuress, who has deceived him from the day of their
+first meeting.  The rapid and mortal duel between them from that
+moment--she with her magnificent lies and siren charm, winding about
+him like a serpent, trying to recover her lost ground; he with his
+man's agony and scorn and lost faith, trying to tear her from his
+heart.  That scene I always thought was a crackerjack.  When Capt.
+Marchmont discovers her duplicity by reading on a blotter in a mirror
+the impression of a note that she has written to the Count, he raises
+his hand to heaven and exclaims:  "O God, who created woman while Adam
+slept, and gave her to him for a companion, take back Thy gift and
+return instead the sleep, though it last forever!"
+
+"Rot," said Hollis, rudely, when I had given those lines with proper
+emphasis.
+
+"I beg your pardon!" I said, as sweetly as I could.
+
+"Come now," went on Hollis, "don't be an idiot.  You know very well
+that nobody spouts any stuff like that these days.  That sketch went
+along all right until you rang in the skyrockets.  Cut out that
+right-arm exercise and the Adam and Eve stunt, and make your captain
+talk as you or I or Bill Jones would."
+
+"I'll admit," said I, earnestly (for my theory was being touched upon),
+"that on all ordinary occasions all of us use commonplace language to
+convey our thoughts.  You will remember that up to the moment when the
+captain makes his terrible discovery all the characters on the stage
+talk pretty much as they would, in real life. But I believe that I am
+right in allowing him lines suitable to the strong and tragic situation
+into which he falls."
+
+"Tragic, my eye!" said my friend, irreverently.  "In Shakespeare's day
+he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort,
+because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and
+discharged the cook with an epic.  But not for B'way in the summer of
+1905!"
+
+"It is my opinion," said I, "that great human emotions shake up our
+vocabulary and leave the words best suited to express them on top.  A
+sudden violent grief or loss or disappointment will bring expressions
+out of an ordinary man as strong and solemn and dramatic as those used
+in fiction or on the stage to portray those emotions."
+
+"That's where you fellows are wrong," said Hollis.  "Plain, every-day
+talk is what goes.  Your captain would very likely have kicked the cat,
+lit a cigar, stirred up a highball, and telephoned for a lawyer,
+instead of getting off those Robert Mantell pyrotechnics."
+
+"Possibly, a little later," I continued.  "But just at the time--just
+as the blow is delivered, if something Scriptural or theatrical and
+deep-tongued isn't wrung from a man in spite of his modern and
+practical way of speaking, then I'm wrong."
+
+"Of course," said Hollis, kindly, "you've got to whoop her up some
+degrees for the stage.  The audience expects it.  When the villain
+kidnaps little Effie you have to make her mother claw some chunks out
+of the atmosphere, and scream: "Me chee-ild, me chee-ild!"  What she
+would actually do would be to call up the police by 'phone, ring for
+some strong tea, and get the little darling's photo out, ready for the
+reporters.  When you get your villain in a corner--a stage corner--it's
+all right for him to clap his hand to his forehead and hiss: "All is
+lost!"  Off the stage he would remark:  "This is a conspiracy against
+me--I refer you to my lawyers.'"
+
+"I get no consolation," said I, gloomily, "from your concession of an
+accentuated stage treatment.  In my play I fondly hoped that I was
+following life.  If people in real life meet great crises in a
+commonplace way, they should do the same on the stage."
+
+And then we drifted, like two trout, out of our cool pool in the great
+hotel and began to nibble languidly at the gay flies in the swift
+current of Broadway.  And our question of dramatic art was unsettled.
+
+We nibbled at the flies, and avoided the hooks, as wise trout do; but
+soon the weariness of Manhattan in summer overcame us.  Nine stories
+up, facing the south, was Hollis's apartment, and we soon stepped into
+an elevator bound for that cooler haven.
+
+I was familiar in those quarters, and quickly my play was forgotten,
+and I stood at a sideboard mixing things, with cracked ice and glasses
+all about me.  A breeze from the bay came in the windows not altogether
+blighted by the asphalt furnace over which it had passed. Hollis,
+whistling softly, turned over a late-arrived letter or two on his
+table, and drew around the coolest wicker armchairs.
+
+I was just measuring the Vermouth carefully when I heard a sound. Some
+man's voice groaned hoarsely:  "False, oh, God!--false, and Love is a
+lie and friendship but the byword of devils!"
+
+I looked around quickly.  Hollis lay across the table with his head
+down upon his outstretched arms.  And then he looked up at me and
+laughed in his ordinary manner.
+
+I knew him--he was poking fun at me about my theory.  And it did seem
+so unnatural, those swelling words during our quiet gossip, that I half
+began to believe I had been mistaken--that my theory was wrong.
+
+Hollis raised himself slowly from the table.
+
+"You were right about that theatrical business, old man," he said,
+quietly, as he tossed a note to me.
+
+I read it.
+
+Loris had run away with Tom Tolliver.
+
+
+
+A LITTLE TALK ABOUT MOBS
+
+"I see," remarked the tall gentleman in the frock coat and black slouch
+hat, "that another street car motorman in your city has narrowly
+excaped lynching at the hands of an infuriated mob by lighting a cigar
+and walking a couple of blocks down the street."
+
+"Do you think they would have lynched him?" asked the New Yorker, in
+the next seat of the ferry station, who was also waiting for the boat.
+
+"Not until after the election," said the tall man, cutting a corner off
+his plug of tobacco.  "I've been in your city long enough to know
+something about your mobs.  The motorman's mob is about the least
+dangerous of them all, except the National Guard and the Dressmakers'
+Convention.
+
+"You see, when little Willie Goldstein is sent by his mother for pigs'
+knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always
+crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and
+then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a
+spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted.  The motorman yells and
+throws himself on the brakes like a football player.  There is a
+horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and
+Willie is sitting, with part of his trousers torn away by the fender,
+screaming for his lost nickel.
+
+"In ten seconds the car is surrounded by 600 infuriated citizens,
+crying, 'Lynch the motorman!  Lynch the motorman!' at the top of their
+voices.  Some of them run to the nearest cigar store to get a rope; but
+they find the last one has just been cut up and labelled. Hundreds of
+the excited mob press close to the cowering motorman, whose hand is
+observed to tremble perceptibly as he transfers a stick of pepsin gum
+from his pocket to his mouth.
+
+"When the bloodthirsty mob of maddened citizens has closed in on the
+motorman, some bringing camp stools and sitting quite close to him, and
+all shouting, 'Lynch him!' Policeman Fogarty forces his way through
+them to the side of their prospective victim.
+
+"'Hello, Mike,' says the motorman in a low voice, 'nice day.  Shall I
+sneak off a block or so, or would you like to rescue me?'
+
+"'Well, Jerry, if you don't mind,' says the policeman, 'I'd like to
+disperse the infuriated mob singlehanded.  I haven't defeated a
+lynching mob since last Tuesday; and that was a small one of only 300,
+that wanted to string up a Dago boy for selling wormy pears. It would
+boost me some down at the station.'
+
+"'All right, Mike,' says the motorman, 'anything to oblige.  I'll turn
+pale and tremble.'
+
+"And he does so; and Policeman Fogarty draws his club and says, 'G'wan
+wid yez!' and in eight seconds the desperate mob has scattered and gone
+about its business, except about a hundred who remain to search for
+Willie's nickel."
+
+"I never heard of a mob in our city doing violence to a motorman
+because of an accident," said the New Yorker.
+
+"You are not liable to," said the tall man.  "They know the motorman's
+all right, and that he wouldn't even run over a stray dog if he could
+help it.  And they know that not a man among 'em would tie the knot to
+hang even a Thomas cat that had been tried and condemned and sentenced
+according to law."
+
+"Then why do they become infuriated and make threats of lynching?"
+asked the New Yorker.
+
+"To assure the motorman," answered the tall man, "that he is safe. If
+they really wanted to do him up they would go into the houses and drop
+bricks on him from the third-story windows."
+
+"New Yorkers are not cowards," said the other man, a little stiffly.
+
+"Not one at a time," agreed the tall man, promptly.  "You've got a fine
+lot of single-handed scrappers in your town.  I'd rather fight three of
+you than one; and I'd go up against all the Gas Trust's victims in a
+bunch before I'd pass two citizens on a dark corner, with my watch
+chain showing.  When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve.
+Get you in crowds and you're easy.  Ask the 'L' road guards and George
+B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island.  Divided you
+stand, united you fall.  _E pluribus nihil_. Whenever one of your mobs
+surrounds a man and begins to holler, 'Lynch him!' he says to himself,
+"Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will,
+forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse to-morrow.  This is a
+sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the
+next handicap.'
+
+"I can imagine the tortured feelings of a prisoner in the hands of New
+York policemen when an infuriated mob demands that he be turned over to
+them for lynching.  'For God's sake, officers,' cries the distracted
+wretch, 'have ye hearts of stone, that ye will not let them wrest me
+from ye?'
+
+"'Sorry, Jimmy,' says one of the policemen, 'but it won't do.  There's
+three of us--me and Darrel and the plain-clothes man; and there's only
+sivin thousand of the mob.  How'd we explain it at the office if they
+took ye?  Jist chase the infuriated aggregation around the corner,
+Darrel, and we'll be movin' along to the station.'"
+
+"Some of our gatherings of excited citizens have not been so harmless,"
+said the New Yorker, with a faint note of civic pride.
+
+"I'll admit that," said the tall man.  "A cousin of mine who was on a
+visit here once had an arm broken and lost an ear in one of them."
+
+"That must have been during the Cooper Union riots," remarked the New
+Yorker.
+
+"Not the Cooper Union," explained the tall man--"but it was a union
+riot--at the Vanastor wedding."
+
+"You seem to be in favor of lynch law," said the New Yorker, severely.
+
+"No, sir, I am not.  No intelligent man is.  But, sir, there are
+certain cases when people rise in their just majesty and take a
+righteous vengeance for crimes that the law is slow in punishing. I am
+an advocate of law and order, but I will say to you that less than six
+months ago I myself assisted at the lynching of one of that race that
+is creating a wide chasm between your section of country and mine, sir."
+
+"It is a deplorable condition," said the New Yorker, "that exists in
+the South, but--"
+
+"I am from Indiana, sir," said the tall man, taking another chew; "and
+I don't think you will condemn my course when I tell you that the
+colored man in question had stolen $9.60 in cash, sir, from my own
+brother."
+
+
+
+THE SNOW MAN
+
+EDITORIAL NOTE.--_Before the fatal illness of William Sydney Porter
+(known through his literary work as "O. Henry") this American master of
+short-story writing had begun for Hampton's Magazine the story printed
+below.  Illness crept upon him rapidly and he was compelled to give up
+writing about at the point where the girl enters the story._
+
+_When he realized that he could do no more (it was his lifelong habit
+to write with a pencil, never dictating to a stenographer), O. Henry
+told in detail the remainder of The Snow Man to Harris Merton Lyon,
+whom he had often spoken of as one of the most effective short-story
+writers of the present time.  Mr. Porter had delineated all of the
+characters, leaving only the rounding out of the plot in the final
+pages to Mr. Lyon._
+
+
+Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children
+is the snow.  To men, it is something like a crucible in which their
+world melts into a white star ten million miles away. The man who can
+stand the test is a Snow Man; and this is his reading by Fahrenheit,
+Reaumur, or Moses's carven tablets of stone.
+
+Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River,
+and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was
+deepening.  The flakes were as large as an hour's circular tatting by
+Miss Wilkins's ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less
+entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting
+could promise.  I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would
+be welcome as a snow-bound pilgrim, both for hospitality's sake and
+because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not
+neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.
+
+The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon where its
+builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on
+both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds; but
+I feared the drift.  Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in
+the hills--the speaking tube of the four winds--came roaring the voice
+of the proprietor to the little room on the top floor.
+
+At my "hello," a ranch hand came from an outer building and received my
+thankful horse.  In another minute, Ross and I sat by a stove in the
+dining-room of the four-room ranch house, while the big, simple welcome
+of the household lay at my disposal.  Fanned by the whizzing norther,
+the fine, dry snow was sifted and bolted through the cracks and
+knotholes of the logs.  The cook room, without a separating door,
+appended.
+
+In there I could see a short, sturdy, leisurely and weather-beaten man
+moving with professional sureness about his red-hot stove. His face was
+stolid and unreadable--something like that of a great thinker, or of
+one who had no thoughts to conceal.  I thought his eye seemed
+unwarrantably superior to the elements and to the man, but quickly
+attributed that to the characteristic self-importance of a petty chef.
+"Camp cook" was the niche that I gave him in the Hall of Types; and he
+fitted it as an apple fits a dumpling.
+
+Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and
+talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the
+freezing draughts.  So he brought the bottle and the cook brought
+boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks
+of Boreas.  We clinked glasses often.  They sounded like icicles
+dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a
+Louis XIV chandelier that I once heard at a boarder's dance in the
+parlor of a ten-a-week boarding-house in Gramercy Square.  _Sic
+transit_.
+
+Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the
+stars; but they who believe that all things, from a without-wine table
+d'hote to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have
+found a nocturne or a symphony to express the isolation of that
+blotted-out world.  The clink of glass and bottle, the aeolian chorus
+of the wind in the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the
+canyon below, and the Wagnerian crash of the cook's pots and pans,
+united in a fit, discordant melody, I thought.  No less welcome an
+accompaniment was the sizzling of broiling ham and venison cutlet
+indorsed by the solvent fumes of true Java, bringing rich promises of
+comfort to our yearning souls.
+
+The cook brought the smoking supper to the table.  He nodded to me
+democratically as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were
+pitching quoits or hurling the discus.  I looked at him with some
+appraisement and curiosity and much conciliation.  There was no prophet
+to tell us when that drifting evil outside might cease to fall; and it
+is well, when snow-bound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the
+cook's favorable consideration.  But I could read neither favor nor
+disapproval in the face and manner of our pot-wrestler.
+
+He was about five feet nine inches, and two hundred pounds of
+commonplace, bull-necked, pink-faced, callous calm.  He wore brown duck
+trousers too tight and too short, and a blue flannel shirt with sleeves
+rolled above his elbows.  There was a sort of grim, steady scowl on his
+features that looked to me as though he had fixed it there purposely as
+a protection against the weakness of an inherent amiability that, he
+fancied, were better concealed.  And then I let supper usurp his brief
+occupancy of my thoughts.
+
+"Draw up, George," said Ross.  "Let's all eat while the grub's hot."
+
+"You fellows go on and chew," answered the cook.  "I ate mine in the
+kitchen before sun-down."
+
+"Think it'll be a big snow, George?" asked the ranchman.
+
+George had turned to reenter the cook room.  He moved slowly around
+and, looking at his face, it seemed to me that he was turning over the
+wisdom and knowledge of centuries in his head.
+
+"It might," was his delayed reply.
+
+At the door of the kitchen he stopped and looked back at us.  Both Ross
+and I held our knives and forks poised and gave him our regard. Some
+men have the power of drawing the attention of others without speaking
+a word.  Their attitude is more effective than a shout.
+
+"And again it mightn't," said George, and went back to his stove.
+
+After we had eaten, he came in and gathered the emptied dishes.  He
+stood for a moment, while his spurious frown deepened.
+
+"It might stop any minute," he said, "or it might keep up for days."
+
+At the farther end of the cook room I saw George pour hot water into
+his dishpan, light his pipe, and put the tableware through its required
+lavation.  He then carefully unwrapped from a piece of old saddle
+blanket a paperback book, and settled himself to read by his dim oil
+lamp.
+
+And then the ranchman threw tobacco on the cleared table and set forth
+again the bottles and glasses; and I saw that I stood in a deep channel
+through which the long dammed flood of his discourse would soon be
+booming.  But I was half content, comparing my fate with that of the
+late Thomas Tucker, who had to sing for his supper, thus doubling the
+burdens of both himself and his host.
+
+"Snow is a hell of a thing," said Ross, by way of a foreword.  "It
+ain't, somehow, it seems to me, salubrious.  I can stand water and mud
+and two inches below zero and a hundred and ten in the shade and
+medium-sized cyclones, but this here fuzzy white stuff naturally gets
+me all locoed.  I reckon the reason it rattles you is because it
+changes the look of things so much.  It's like you had a wife and left
+her in the morning with the same old blue cotton wrapper on, and rides
+in of a night and runs across her all outfitted in a white silk evening
+frock, waving an ostrich-feather fan, and monkeying with a posy of lily
+flowers.  Wouldn't it make you look for your pocket compass?  You'd be
+liable to kiss her before you collected your presence of mind."
+
+By and by, the flood of Ross's talk was drawn up into the clouds (so it
+pleased me to fancy) and there condensed into the finer snowflakes of
+thought; and we sat silent about the stove, as good friends and bitter
+enemies will do.  I thought of Boss's preamble about the mysterious
+influence upon man exerted by that ermine-lined monster that now
+covered our little world, and knew he was right.
+
+Of all the curious knickknacks, mysteries, puzzles, Indian gifts,
+rat-traps, and well-disguised blessings that the gods chuck down to us
+from the Olympian peaks, the most disquieting and evil-bringing is the
+snow.  By scientific analysis it is absolute beauty and purity--so, at
+the beginning we look doubtfully at chemistry.
+
+It falls upon the world, and lo! we live in another.  It hides in a
+night the old scars and familiar places with which we have grown
+heart-sick or enamored.  So, as quietly as we can, we hustle on our
+embroidered robes and hie us on Prince Camaralzaman's horse or in the
+reindeer sleigh into the white country where the seven colors converge.
+This is when our fancy can overcome the bane of it.
+
+But in certain spots of the earth comes the snow-madness, made known by
+people turned wild and distracted by the bewildering veil that has
+obscured the only world they know.  In the cities, the white fairy who
+sets the brains of her dupes whirling by a wave of her wand is cast for
+the comedy role.  Her diamond shoe buckles glitter like frost; with a
+pirouette she invites the spotless carnival.
+
+But in the waste places the snow is sardonic.  Sponging out the world
+of the outliers, it gives no foothold on another sphere in return. It
+makes of the earth a firmament under foot; it leaves us clawing and
+stumbling in space in an inimical fifth element whose evil outdoes its
+strangeness and beauty, There Nature, low comedienne, plays her tricks
+on man.  Though she has put him forth as her highest product, it
+appears that she has fashioned him with what seems almost incredible
+carelessness and indexterity.  One-sided and without balance, with his
+two halves unequally fashioned and joined, must he ever jog his
+eccentric way.  The snow falls, the darkness caps it, and the
+ridiculous man-biped strays in accurate circles until he succumbs in
+the ruins of his defective architecture.
+
+In the throat of the thirsty the snow is vitriol.  In appearance as
+plausible as the breakfast food of the angels, it is as hot in the
+mouth as ginger, increasing the pangs of the water-famished.  It is a
+derivative from water, air, and some cold, uncanny fire from which the
+caloric has been extracted.  Good has been said of it; even the poets,
+crazed by its spell and shivering in their attics under its touch, have
+indited permanent melodies commemorative of its beauty.
+
+Still, to the saddest overcoated optimist it is a plague--a corroding
+plague that Pharaoh successfully side-stepped.  It beneficently covers
+the wheat fields, swelling the crop--and the Flour Trust gets us by the
+throat like a sudden quinsy.  It spreads the tail of its white kirtle
+over the red seams of the rugged north--and the Alaskan short story is
+born.  Etiolated perfidy, it shelters the mountain traveler burrowing
+from the icy air--and, melting to-morrow, drowns his brother in the
+valley below.
+
+At its worst it is lock and key and crucible, and the wand of Circe.
+When it corrals man in lonely ranches, mountain cabins, and forest
+huts, the snow makes apes and tigers of the hardiest.  It turns the
+bosoms of weaker ones to glass, their tongues to infants' rattles,
+their hearts to lawlessness and spleen.  It is not all from the
+isolation; the snow is not merely a blockader; it is a Chemical Test.
+It is a good man who can show a reaction that is not chiefly composed
+of a drachm or two of potash and magnesia, with traces of Adam,
+Ananias, Nebuchadnezzar, and the fretful porcupine.
+
+This is no story, you say; well, let it begin.
+
+There was a knock at the door (is the opening not full of context and
+reminiscence oh, best buyers of best sellers?).
+
+We drew the latch, and in stumbled Etienne Girod (as he afterward named
+himself).  But just then he was no more than a worm struggling for
+life, enveloped in a killing white chrysalis.
+
+We dug down through snow, overcoats, mufflers, and waterproofs, and
+dragged forth a living thing with a Van Dyck beard and marvellous
+diamond rings.  We put it through the approved curriculum of
+snow-rubbing, hot milk, and teaspoonful doses of whiskey, working him
+up to a graduating class entitled to a diploma of three fingers of rye
+in half a glassful of hot water.  One of the ranch boys had already
+come from the quarters at Ross's bugle-like yell and kicked the
+stranger's staggering pony to some sheltered corral where beasts were
+entertained.
+
+Let a paragraphic biography of Girod intervene.
+
+Etienne was an opera singer originally, we gathered; but adversity and
+the snow had made him _non compos vocis_.  The adversity consisted of
+the stranded San Salvador Opera Company, a period of hotel second-story
+work, and then a career as a professional palmist, jumping from town to
+town.  For, like other professional palmists, every time he worked the
+Heart Line too strongly he immediately moved along the Line of Least
+Resistance.  Though Etienne did not confide this to us, we surmised
+that he had moved out into the dusk about twenty minutes ahead of a
+constable, and had thus encountered the snow.  In his most sacred blue
+language he dilated upon the subject of snow; for Etienne was
+Paris-born and loved the snow with the same passion that an orchid does.
+
+"Mee-ser-rhable!" commented Etienne, and took another three fingers.
+
+"Complete, cast-iron, pussy-footed, blank... blank!" said Ross, and
+followed suit.
+
+"Rotten," said I.
+
+The cook said nothing.  He stood in the door weighing our outburst; and
+insistently from behind that frozen visage I got two messages (via the
+M. A. M wireless).  One was that George considered our vituperation
+against the snow childish; the other was that George did not love
+Dagoes.  Inasmuch as Etienne was a Frenchman, I concluded I had the
+message wrong.  So I queried the other: "Bright eyes, you don't really
+mean Dagoes, do you?" and over the wireless came three deathly, psychic
+taps:  "Yes."  Then I reflected that to George all foreigners were
+probably "Dagoes."  I had once known another camp cook who had thought
+Mons., Sig., and Millie (Trans-Mississippi for Mlle.) were Italian
+given names; this cook used to marvel therefore at the paucity of
+Neo-Roman precognomens, and therefore why not--
+
+I have said that snow is a test of men.  For one day, two days, Etienne
+stood at the window, Fletcherizing his finger nails and shrieking and
+moaning at the monotony.  To me, Etienne was just about as unbearable
+as the snow; and so, seeking relief, I went out on the second day to
+look at my horse, slipped on a stone, broke my collarbone, and
+thereafter underwent not the snow test, but the test of
+flat-on-the-back.  A test that comes once too often for any man to
+stand.
+
+However, I bore up cheerfully.  I was now merely a spectator, and from
+my couch in the big room I could lie and watch the human interplay with
+that detached, impassive, impersonal feeling which French writers tell
+us is so valuable to the litterateur, and American writers to the
+faro-dealer.
+
+"I shall go crazy in this abominable, mee-ser-rhable place!" was
+Etienne's constant prediction.
+
+"Never knew Mark Twain to bore me before," said Ross, over and over. He
+sat by the other window, hour after hour, a box of Pittsburg stogies of
+the length, strength, and odor of a Pittsburg graft scandal deposited
+on one side of him, and "Roughing It," "The Jumping Frog," and "Life on
+the Mississippi" on the other.  For every chapter he lit a new stogy,
+puffing furiously.  This in time, gave him a recurrent premonition of
+cramps, gastritis, smoker's colic or whatever it is they have in
+Pittsburg after a too deep indulgence in graft scandals. To fend off
+the colic, Ross resorted time and again to Old Doctor Still's
+Amber-Colored U. S. A. Colic Cure.  Result, after forty-eight
+hours--nerves.
+
+"Positive fact I never knew Mark Twain to make me tired before.
+Positive fact."  Ross slammed "Roughing It" on the floor.  "When you're
+snowbound this-away you want tragedy, I guess.  Humor just seems to
+bring out all your cussedness.  You read a man's poor, pitiful attempts
+to be funny and it makes you so nervous you want to tear the book up,
+get out your bandana, and have a good, long cry."
+
+At the other end of the room, the Frenchman took his finger nails out
+of his mouth long enough to exclaim:  "Humor!  Humor at such a time as
+thees!  My God, I shall go crazy in thees abominable--"
+
+"Supper," announced George.
+
+These meals were not the meals of Rabelais who said, "the great God
+makes the planets and we make the platters neat."  By that time, the
+ranch-house meals were not affairs of gusto; they were mental
+distraction, not bodily provender.  What they were to be later shall
+never be forgotten by Ross or me or Etienne.
+
+After supper, the stogies and finger nails began again.  My shoulder
+ached wretchedly, and with half-closed eyes I tried to forget it by
+watching the deft movements of the stolid cook.
+
+Suddenly I saw him cock his ear, like a dog.  Then, with a swift step,
+he moved to the door, threw it open, and stood there.
+
+The rest of us had heard nothing.
+
+"What is it, George?" asked Ross.
+
+The cook reached out his hand into the darkness alongside the jamb.
+With careful precision he prodded something.  Then he made one careful
+step into the snow.  His back muscles bulged a little under the arms as
+he stooped and lightly lifted a burden.  Another step inside the door,
+which he shut methodically behind him, and he dumped the burden at a
+safe distance from the fire.
+
+He stood up and fixed us with a solemn eye.  None of us moved under
+that Orphic suspense until,
+
+"A woman," remarked George.
+
+
+Miss Willie Adams was her name.  Vocation, school-teacher.  Present
+avocation, getting  lost  in  the  snow.  Age, yum-yum (the Persian for
+twenty).  Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow
+for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her
+skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons
+for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the
+leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as
+ferns; her toe as small as a deer track.  General impression upon the
+dazed beholder--you could not see the forest for the trees.
+
+Psychology, with a capital P and the foot of a lynx, at this juncture
+stalks into the ranch house.  Three men, a cook, a pretty young
+woman--all snowbound.  Count me out of it, as I did not count, anyway.
+I never did, with women.  Count the cook out, if you like.  But note
+the effect upon Ross and Etienne Girod.
+
+Ross dumped Mark Twain in a trunk and locked the trunk.  Also, he
+discarded the Pittsburg scandals.  Also, he shaved off a three days'
+beard.
+
+Etienne, being French, began on the beard first.  He pomaded it, from a
+little tube of grease Hongroise in his vest pocket.   He combed it with
+a little aluminum comb from the same vest pocket. He trimmed it with
+manicure scissors from the same vest pocket.  His light and Gallic
+spirits underwent a sudden, miraculous change.  He hummed a blithe San
+Salvador Opera Company tune; he grinned, smirked, bowed, pirouetted,
+twiddled, twaddled, twisted, and tooralooed.  Gayly, the notorious
+troubadour, could not have equalled Etienne.
+
+Ross's method of advance was brusque, domineering.  "Little woman," he
+said, "you're welcome here!"--and with what he thought subtle double
+meaning--"welcome to stay here as long as you like, snow or no snow."
+
+Miss Adams thanked him a little wildly, some of the wintergreen berries
+creeping into the birch bark.  She looked around hurriedly as if
+seeking escape.  But there was none, save the kitchen and the room
+allotted her.  She made an excuse and disappeared into her own room.
+
+Later I, feigning sleep, heard the following:
+
+"Mees Adams, I was almost to perish-die-of monotony w'en your fair and
+beautiful face appear in thees mee-ser-rhable house."  I opened my
+starboard eye.  The beard was being curled furiously around a finger,
+the Svengali eye was rolling, the chair was being hunched closer to the
+school-teacher's.  "I am French--you see--temperamental--nervous! I
+cannot endure thees dull hours in thees ranch house; but--a woman
+comes!  Ah!"  The shoulders gave nine 'rahs and a tiger.  "What a
+difference!  All is light and gay; ever'ting smile w'en you smile. You
+have 'eart, beauty, grace.  My 'eart comes back to me w'en I feel your
+'eart.  So!"  He laid his hand upon his vest pocket.  From this vantage
+point he suddenly snatched at the  school-teacher's own hand, "Ah!
+Mees Adams, if I could only tell you how I ad--"
+
+"Dinner," remarked George.  He was standing just behind the Frenchman's
+ear.  His eyes looked straight into the school-teacher's eyes.  After
+thirty seconds of survey, his lips moved, deep in the flinty, frozen
+maelstrom of his face:  "Dinner," he concluded, "will be ready in two
+minutes."
+
+Miss Adams jumped to her feet, relieved.  "I must get ready for
+dinner," she said brightly, and went into her room.
+
+Ross came in fifteen minutes late.  After the dishes had been cleaned
+away, I waited until a propitious time when the room was temporarily
+ours alone, and told him what had happened.
+
+He became so excited that he lit a stogy without thinking.
+"Yeller-hided, unwashed, palm-readin' skunk," he said under his breath.
+"I'll shoot him full o' holes if he don't watch out--talkin' that way
+to my wife!"
+
+I gave a jump that set my collarbone back another week.  "Your wife!" I
+gasped.
+
+"Well, I mean to make her that," he announced.
+
+The air in the ranch house the rest of that day was tense with pent-up
+emotions, oh, best buyers of best sellers.
+
+Ross watched Miss Adams as a hawk does a hen; he watched Etienne as a
+hawk does a scarecrow, Etienne watched Miss Adams as a weasel does a
+henhouse.  He paid no attention to Ross.
+
+The condition of Miss Adams, in the role of sought-after, was feverish.
+Lately escaped from the agony and long torture of the white cold, where
+for hours Nature had kept the little school-teacher's vision locked in
+and turned upon herself, nobody knows through what profound feminine
+introspections she had gone.  Now, suddenly cast among men, instead of
+finding relief and security, she beheld herself plunged anew into other
+discomforts.  Even in her own room she could hear the loud voices of
+her imposed suitors.  "I'll blow you full o' holes!" shouted Ross.
+"Witnesses," shrieked Etienne, waving his hand at the cook and me.  She
+could not have known the previous harassed condition of the men,
+fretting under indoor conditions.  All she knew was, that where she had
+expected the frank freemasonry of the West, she found the subtle tangle
+of two men's minds, bent upon exacting whatever romance there might be
+in her situation.
+
+She tried to dodge Ross and the Frenchman by spells of nursing me. They
+also came over to help nurse.  This combination aroused such a natural
+state of invalid cussedness on my part that they were all forced to
+retire.  Once she did manage to whisper:  "I am so worried here.  I
+don't know what to do."
+
+To which I replied, gently, hitching up my shoulder, that I was a
+hunch-savant and that the Eighth House under this sign, the Moon being
+in Virgo, showed that everything would turn out all right.
+
+But twenty minutes later I saw Etienne reading her palm and felt that
+perhaps I might have to recast her horoscope, and try for a dark man
+coming with a bundle.
+
+Toward sunset, Etienne left the house for a few moments and Ross, who
+had been sitting taciturn and morose, having unlocked Mark Twain, made
+another dash.  It was typical Ross talk.
+
+He stood in front of her and looked down majestically at that cool and
+perfect spot where Miss Adams' forehead met the neat part in her
+fragrant hair.  First, however, he cast a desperate glance at me.  I
+was in a profound slumber.
+
+"Little woman," he began, "it's certainly tough for a man like me to
+see you bothered this way.  You"--gulp--"you have been alone in this
+world too long.  You need a protector.  I might say that at a time like
+this you need a protector the worst kind--a protector who would take a
+three-ring delight in smashing the saffron-colored kisser off of any
+yeller-skinned skunk that made himself obnoxious to you.  Hem. Hem.  I
+am a lonely man, Miss Adams.  I have so far had to carry on my life
+without the"--gulp--"sweet radiance"--gulp--"of a woman around the
+house.  I feel especially doggoned lonely at a time like this, when I
+am pretty near locoed from havin' to stall indoors, and hence it was
+with delight I welcomed your first appearance in this here shack.
+Since then I have been packed jam full of more different kinds of
+feelings, ornery, mean, dizzy, and superb, than has fallen my way in
+years."
+
+Miss Adams made a useless movement toward escape.  The Ross chin stuck
+firm.  "I don't want to annoy you, Miss Adams, but, by heck, if it
+comes to that you'll have to be annoyed.  And I'll have to have my say.
+This palm-ticklin' slob of a Frenchman ought to be kicked off the place
+and if you'll say the word, off he goes.  But I don't want to do the
+wrong thing.  You've got to show a preference.  I'm gettin' around to
+the point, Miss--Miss Willie, in my own brick fashion.  I've stood
+about all I can stand these last two days and somethin's got to happen.
+The suspense hereabouts is enough to hang a sheepherder. Miss
+Willie"--he lassooed her hand by main force--"just say the word. You
+need somebody to take your part all your life long.  Will you mar--"
+
+"Supper," remarked George, tersely, from the kitchen door.
+
+Miss Adams hurried away.
+
+Ross turned angrily.  "You--"
+
+"I have been revolving it in my head," said George.
+
+He brought the coffee pot forward heavily. Then bravely the big platter
+of pork and beans.  Then somberly the potatoes.  Then profoundly the
+biscuits.  "I have been revolving it in my mind. There ain't no use
+waitin' any longer for Swengalley.  Might as well eat now."
+
+From my excellent vantage-point on the couch I watched the progress of
+that meal.  Ross, muddled, glowering, disappointed; Etienne, eternally
+blandishing, attentive, ogling; Miss Adams, nervous, picking at her
+food, hesitant about answering questions, almost hysterical; now and
+then the solid, flitting shadow of the cook, passing behind their backs
+like a Dreadnaught in a fog.
+
+I used to own a clock which gurgled in its throat three minutes before
+it struck the hour.  I know, therefore, the slow freight of
+Anticipation.  For I have awakened at three in the morning, heard the
+clock gurgle, and waited those three minutes for the three strokes I
+knew were to come.  _Alors_.  In Ross's ranch house that night the slow
+freight of  Climax whistled in the distance.
+
+Etienne began it after supper.  Miss Adams had suddenly displayed a
+lively interest in the kitchen layout and I could see her in there,
+chatting brightly at George--not with him--the while he ducked his head
+and rattled his pans.
+
+"My fren'," said Etienne, exhaling a large cloud from his cigarette and
+patting Ross lightly on the shoulder with a bediamonded hand which,
+hung limp from a yard or more of bony arm, "I see I mus' be frank with
+you.  Firs', because we are rivals; second, because you take these
+matters so serious. I--I am Frenchman.  I love the women"--he threw
+back his curls, bared his yellow teeth, and blew an unsavory kiss
+toward the kitchen.  "It is, I suppose, a trait of my nation.  All
+Frenchmen love the women--pretty women.  Now, look: Here I am!"  He
+spread out his arms.  "Cold outside!  I detes' the col-l-l!  Snow!  I
+abominate the mees-ser-rhable snow!  Two men! This--" pointing to
+me--"an' this!"  Pointing to' Ross.  "I am distracted!  For two whole
+days I stan' at the window an' tear my 'air!  I am nervous, upset,
+pr-r-ro-foun'ly distress inside my 'ead! An' suddenly--be'old!  A
+woman, a nice, pretty, charming, innocen' young woman!  I, naturally,
+rejoice.  I become myself again--gay, light-'earted, 'appy.  I address
+myself to mademoiselle; it passes the time.  That, m'sieu', is wot the
+women are for--pass the time! Entertainment--like the music, like the
+wine!
+
+"They appeal to the mood, the caprice, the temperamen'.  To play with
+thees woman, follow her through her humor, pursue her--ah! that is the
+mos' delightful way to sen' the hours about their business."
+
+Ross banged the table.  "Shut up, you miserable yeller pup!" he roared.
+"I object to your pursuin' anything or anybody in my house. Now, you
+listen to me, you--"  He picked up the box of stogies and used it on
+the table as an emphasizer.  The noise of it awoke the attention of the
+girl in the kitchen.  Unheeded, she crept into the room.  "I don't know
+anything about your French ways of lovemakin' an' I don't care.  In my
+section of the country, it's the best man wins. And I'm the best man
+here, and don't you forget it!  This girl's goin' to be mine.  There
+ain't going to be any playing, or philandering, or palm reading about
+it.  I've made up my mind I'll have this girl, and that settles it.  My
+word is the law in this neck o' the woods. She's mine, and as soon as
+she says she's mine, you pull out."  The box made one final, tremendous
+punctuation point.
+
+Etienne's bravado was unruffled.  "Ah! that is no way to win a woman,"
+he smiled, easily.  "I make prophecy you will never win 'er that way.
+No.  Not thees woman.  She mus' be played along an' then keessed, this
+charming, delicious little creature.  One kees!  An' then you 'ave
+her."  Again he displayed his unpleasant teeth.  "I make you a bet I
+will kees her--"
+
+As a cheerful chronicler of deeds done well, it joys me to relate that
+the hand which fell upon Etienne's amorous lips was not his own. There
+was one sudden sound, as of a mule kicking a lath fence, and
+then--through the swinging doors of oblivion for Etienne.
+
+I had seen this blow delivered.  It was an aloof, unstudied, almost
+absent-minded affair.  I had thought the cook was rehearsing the proper
+method of turning a flapjack.
+
+Silently, lost in thought, he stood there scratching his head.  Then he
+began rolling down his sleeves.
+
+"You'd better get your things on, Miss, and we'll get out of here," he
+decided.  "Wrap up warm."
+
+I heard her heave a little sigh of relief as she went to get her cloak,
+sweater, and hat.
+
+Ross jumped to his feet, and said:  "George, what are you goin' to do?"
+
+George, who had been headed in my direction, slowly swivelled around
+and faced his employer.  "Bein' a camp cook, I ain't over-burdened with
+hosses," George enlightened us.  "Therefore, I am going to try to
+borrow this feller's here."
+
+For the first time in four days my soul gave a genuine cheer.  "If it's
+for Lochinvar purposes, go as far as you like," I said, grandly.
+
+The cook studied me a moment, as if trying to find an insult in my
+words.  "No," he replied.  "It's for mine and the young lady's
+purposes, and we'll go only three miles--to Hicksville.  Now let me
+tell you somethin', Ross." Suddenly I was confronted with the cook's
+chunky back and I heard a low, curt, carrying voice shoot through the
+room at my host.  George had wheeled just as Ross started to speak.
+"You're nutty.  That's what's the matter with you.  You can't stand the
+snow. You're getting nervouser, and nuttier every day.  That and this
+Dago"--he jerked a thumb at the half-dead Frenchman in the corner--"has
+got you to the point where I thought I better horn in. I got to
+revolving it around in my mind and I seen if somethin' wasn't done, and
+done soon, there'd be murder around here and maybe"--his head gave an
+imperceptible list toward the girl's room--"worse."
+
+He stopped, but he held up a stubby finger to keep any one else from
+speaking.  Then he plowed slowly through the drift of his ideas. "About
+this here woman.  I know you, Ross, and I know what you reely think
+about women.  If she hadn't happened in here durin' this here snow,
+you'd never have given two thoughts to the whole woman question.
+Likewise, when the storm clears, and you and the boys go hustlin' out,
+this here whole business 'll clear out of your head and you won't think
+of a skirt again until Kingdom Come.  Just because o' this snow here,
+don't forget you're living in the selfsame world you was in four days
+ago.  And you're the same man, too.  Now, what's the use o' getting all
+snarled up over four days of stickin' in the house?  That there's what
+I been revolvin' in my mind and this here's the decision I've come to."
+
+He plodded to the door and shouted to one of the ranch hands to saddle
+my horse.
+
+Ross lit a stogy and stood thoughtful in the middle of the room.  Then
+he began:  "I've a durn good notion, George, to knock your confounded
+head off and throw you into that snowbank, if--"
+
+"You're wrong, mister.  That ain't a durned good notion you've got.
+It's durned bad.  Look here!"  He pointed steadily out of doors until
+we were both forced to follow his finger.  "You're in here for more'n a
+week yet." After allowing this fact to sink in, he barked out at Ross:
+"Can you cook?"  Then at me:  "Can you cook?"  Then he looked at the
+wreck of Etienne and sniffed.
+
+There was an embarrassing silence as Ross and I thought solemnly of a
+foodless week.
+
+"If you just use hoss sense," concluded George, "and don't go for to
+hurt my feelin's, all I want to do is to take this young gal down to
+Hicksville; and then I'll head back here and cook fer you."
+
+The horse and Miss Adams arrived simultaneously, both of them very
+serious and quiet.  The horse because he knew what he had before him in
+that weather; the girl because of what she had left behind.
+
+Then all at once I awoke to a realization of what the cook was doing.
+"My God, man!" I cried, "aren't you afraid to go out in that snow?"
+
+Behind my back I heard Ross mutter, "Not him."
+
+George lifted the girl daintily up behind the saddle, drew on his
+gloves, put his foot in the stirrup, and turned to inspect me leisurely.
+
+As I passed slowly in his review, I saw in my mind's eye the algebraic
+equation of Snow, the equals sign, and the answer in the man before me.
+
+"Snow is my last name," said George.  He swung into the saddle and they
+started cautiously out into the darkening swirl of fresh new currency
+just issuing from the Snowdrop Mint.  The girl, to keep her place,
+clung happily to the sturdy figure of the camp cook.
+
+I brought three things away from Ross Curtis's ranch house--yes, four.
+One was the appreciation of snow, which I have so humbly tried here to
+render; (2) was a collarbone, of which I am extra careful; (3) was a
+memory of what it is to eat very extremely bad food for a week; and (4)
+was the cause of (3) a little note delivered at the end of the week and
+hand-painted in blue pencil on a sheet of meat paper.
+
+"I cannot come back there to that there job.  Mrs. Snow say no, George.
+I been revolvin' it in my mind; considerin' circumstances she's right."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Waifs and Strays, by O. Henry
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