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

told her he found out she was coming for the kid, and he was on the same train. Mrs. Conyers had been living with her brother, and they’d watched the boy always, as her husband had tried to steal him before. I judge that man was worse than a street railway promoter. It seems he had spent her money and slugged her and killed her canary bird, and told it around that she had cold feet.

“At the hotel we found a mass meeting of five infuriated citizens chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage. Most of the town was asleep by ten o’clock. I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I will take the one o’clock train for the next town, forty miles east, for it is likely that the esteemed Mr. Conyers will drive there to take the cars. ‘I don’t know,’ I tells her, ‘but what he has legal rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace proposition.’

“Mrs. Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord’s wife, who is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the poor dear. The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one suspender, and says to me:

“ ‘Ain’t had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall’s wife swallered a spring lizard. I seen him through the winder hit her with the buggy whip, and everything. What’s that suit of clothes cost you you got on? ’Pears like we’d have some rain, don’t it? Say, doc, that Indian of yorn’s on a kind of a whizz tonight, ain’t he? He comes along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. He gives a cur’us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our constable’ll have him in the lockup ’fore morning.’

“I thought I’d sit on the porch and wait for the one o’clock train. I wasn’t feeling saturated with mirth. Here was John Tom on one of his sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me. But then, I’m always having trouble with other people’s troubles. Every few minutes Mrs. Conyers would come out on the porch and look down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand. Now, wasn’t that like a woman? And that brings up cats. ‘I saw a mouse go in this hole,’ says Mrs. Cat; ‘you can go prize up a plank over there if you like; I’ll watch this hole.’

“About a quarter to one o’clock the lady comes out again, restless, crying easy, as females do for their own amusement, and she looks down that road again and listens. ‘Now, ma’am,’ says I, ‘there’s no use watching cold wheel-tracks. By this time they’re halfway to⁠—’ ‘Hush,’ she says, holding up her hand. And I do hear something coming ‘flip-flap’ in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinée. And up the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian. The lamp in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize Mr. J. T. Little Bear, alumnus of the class of ’91. What I see is a Cherokee brave, and the warpath is what he has been travelling. Firewater and other things have got him going. His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers are mixed up like a frizzly hen’s. The dust of miles is on his moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear. But in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian’s collar.

“ ‘Pappoose!’ says John Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man’s syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear’s claws and copper color. ‘Me bring,’ says he, and he lays the kid in his mother’s arms. ‘Run fifteen mile,’ says John Tom⁠—‘Ugh! Catch white man. Bring pappoose.’

“The little woman is in extremities of gladness. She must wake up that stir-up trouble youngster and hug him and make proclamation that he is his mamma’s own precious treasure. I was about to ask questions, but I looked at Mr. Little Bear, and my eye caught the sight of something in his belt. ‘Now go to bed, ma’am,’ says I, ‘and this gadabout youngster likewise, for there’s no more danger, and the kidnapping business is not what it was earlier in the night.’

“I inveigled John Tom down to camp quick, and when he tumbled over asleep I got that thing out of his belt and disposed of it where the eye of education can’t see it. For even the football colleges disapprove of the art of scalp-taking in their curriculums.

“It is ten o’clock next day when John Tom wakes up and looks around. I am glad to see the nineteenth century in his eyes again.

“ ‘What was it, Jeff?’ he asks.

“ ‘Heap firewater,’ says I.

“John Tom frowns, and thinks a little. ‘Combined,’ says he directly, ‘with the interesting little physiological shakeup known as reversion to type. I remember now. Have they gone yet?’

“ ‘On the 7:30 train,’ I answers.

“ ‘Ugh!’ says John Tom; ‘better so. Paleface, bring big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough a little bromo-seltzer, and then he’ll take up the redman’s burden again.’ ”

The Whirligig of Life

Justice-of-the-Peace Benaja Widdup sat in the door of his office smoking his elder-stem pipe. Halfway to the zenith the Cumberland range rose blue-gray in the afternoon haze. A speckled hen swaggered down the main street of the “settlement,” cackling foolishly.

Up the road came a sound of creaking axles, and then a slow cloud of dust, and then a bull-cart bearing Ransie Bilbro and his wife. The cart stopped at the Justice’s door, and the two climbed down.