Short Fiction by O. Henry (librera reader txt) 📕

“The case never needed to be fixed up this way, Tom,” said Longley. “I saw Cooper this evening, and he told me what you and him talked about. Then I went down to your house tonight and saw you come out with your guns on, and I followed you. Let’s go back, Tom.”

They walked away together, side by side.

“ ’Twas the only chance I saw,” said Merwin presently. “You called your loan, and I tried to answer you. Now, what’ll you do, Bill, if they sock it to you?”

“What would you have done if they’d socked it to you?” was the answer Longley made.

“I never thought I’d lay in a bush to stick up a train,” remarked Merwin; “but a call loan’s different. A call’s a call with me. We’ve got twelve hours yet, Bill, before this spy jumps onto you. We’ve got to raise them spondulicks somehow. Maybe we can⁠—Great Sam Houston! do you hear that?”

Merwin broke into a run, and Longley kept with him, hearing only a rather pleasing whistle somewhere in the night rendering the lugubrious air of “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

“It’s the only tune he knows,” shouted Merwin, as he ran. “I’ll bet⁠—”

They were at the door of Merwin’s house. He kicked it open and fell over an old valise lying in the middle of the floor. A sunburned, firm-jawed youth, stained by travel, lay upon the bed puffing at a brown cigarette.

“What’s the word, Ed?” gasped Merwin.

“So, so,” drawled that capable youngster. “Just got in on the 9:30. Sold the bunch for fifteen, straight. Now, buddy, you want to quit kickin’ a valise around that’s got $29,000 in greenbacks in its in’ards.”

Again today, at a certain street, on the ragged boundaries of the city, Lawrence Holcombe stopped the trolley car and got off. Holcombe was a handsome, prosperous business man of forty; a man of high social standing and connections. His comfortable suburban residence was some five miles farther out on the car line from the street where so often of late he had dropped off the outgoing car. The conductor winked at a regular passenger, and nodded his head archly in the direction of Holcombe’s hurrying figure.

“Getting to be a regular thing,” commented the conductor.

Holcombe picked his way gingerly down a roughly graded side street infested with ragged urchins and impeded by abandoned tinware. He stopped at a small cottage fenced in with a patch of stony ground with a few stunted shade-trees growing about it. A stout, middle-aged woman was washing clothes in a tub at one side of the door. She looked around, and smiled a smile of fat recognition.

“Good avening, Mr. Holcombe, is it yerself ag’in? Ye’ll find Katie inside, sir.”

“Did you speak to her for me?” asked Holcombe, in a low voice; “did you try to help me gain her consent as you promised to do?”

“Sure, and I did that. But, sir, ye know gyurls will be gyurls. The more ye coax ’em the wilfuller they gets. ’Tis yer own pleadin’ that’ll get her if anything will. An’ I hopes ye may, for I tells her she’ll never get a betther offer than yours, sir. ’Tis a good girl she is, and a tidy hand for anything from the kitchen to the parlour, and she’s never a fault except, maybe, a bit too much likin’ for dances and ruffles and ribbons, but that’s natural to her age and good looks if I do say it meself, bein’ her mither, Mr. Holcombe. Ye can spake ag’in to Katie, sir, and maybe this time ye’ll have luck unless Danny Conlan, the wild gossoon, has been at it ag’in overpersuadin’ her ag’inst ye.”

Holcombe turned slightly pale, and his lips closed tightly for a moment.

“I’ve heard of this fellow Conlan before. Why does he interfere? Why does he stand in the way? Is there anything between him and Katie? Does Katie care for him?”

Mrs. Flynn gave a sigh, like a puff of a locomotive, and a flap upon the washboard with a sodden garment that sent Holcombe, well splashed, six feet away.

“Ask me no questions about what’s in a gyurl’s heart and I’ll tell ye no lies. Her own mither can’t tell any more than yerself, Mr. Holcombe.”

Holcombe stepped inside the cottage. Katie Flynn, with rolled-up sleeves, was ironing a dress of flounced muslin. Criticism of Holcombe’s deviation from his own sphere to this star of lower orbit must have waned at the sight of the girl. Her beauty was of the most solvent and convincing sort. Dusky Irish eyes, one great braid of jetty, shining hair, a crimson mouth, dimpling and shaping itself to every mood of its owner, a figure strong and graceful, seemingly full of imperishable life and action⁠—Katie Flynn was one to be sought after and striven for.

Holcombe went and stood by her side as she ironed, and watched the lithe play of muscles rolling beneath the satiny skin of her rounded forearms.

“Katie,” he said, his voice concealing a certain anxiety beneath a wooing tenderness, “I have come for my answer. It isn’t necessary to repeat what we have talked over so often, but you know how anxious I am to have you. You know my circumstances and position, and that you will have every comfort and every privilege that you could ask for. Say ‘Yes,’ Katie, and I’ll be the luckiest man in this town today.”

Kate set her iron down with a metallic click, and leaned her elbows upon the ironing board. Her great blue-black eyes went, in their Irish way, from sparkling fun to thoughtful melancholy.

“Oh, Mr. Holcombe, I don’t know what to say. I know you’d be kind to me, and give me the best home I could ever expect. I’d like to say ‘yes’⁠—indeed I would. I’d about decided to tell you so, but there’s Danny⁠—he objects so.”

Danny again! Holcombe strode up and down the room impatiently frowning.

“Who is this fellow Conlan, Katie?” he asked. “Every time I nearly