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

to pancakes,’ says I, ‘as close as the middle one of a stack; and don’t go and mistake sentiments for syrup, or there’ll be singing at your ranch, and you won’t hear it.’

“ ‘To convince you that I am sincere,’ says the sheep man, ‘I’ll ask you to help me. Miss Learight and you being closer friends, maybe she would do for you what she wouldn’t for me. If you will get me a copy of that pancake recipe, I give you my word that I’ll never call upon her again.’

“ ‘That’s fair,’ I says, and I shook hands with Jackson Bird. ‘I’ll get it for you if I can, and glad to oblige.’ And he turned off down the big pear flat on the Piedra, in the direction of Mired Mule; and I steered northwest for old Bill Toomey’s ranch.

“It was five days afterward when I got another chance to ride over to Pimienta. Miss Willella and me passed a gratifying evening at Uncle Emsley’s. She sang some, and exasperated the piano quite a lot with quotations from the operas. I gave imitations of a rattlesnake, and told her about Snaky McFee’s new way of skinning cows, and described the trip I made to Saint Louis once. We was getting along in one another’s estimations fine. Thinks I, if Jackson Bird can now be persuaded to migrate, I win. I recollect his promise about the pancake receipt, and I thinks I will persuade it from Miss Willella and give it to him; and then if I catches Birdie off of Mired Mule again, I’ll make him hop the twig.

“So, along about ten o’clock, I put on a wheedling smile and says to Miss Willella: ‘Now, if there’s anything I do like better than the sight of a red steer on green grass it’s the taste of a nice hot pancake smothered in sugar-house molasses.’

“Miss Willella gives a little jump on the piano stool, and looked at me curious.

“ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘they’re real nice. What did you say was the name of that street in Saint Louis, Mr. Odom, where you lost your hat?’

“ ‘Pancake Avenue,’ says I, with a wink, to show her that I was on about the family receipt, and couldn’t be side-corralled off of the subject. ‘Come, now, Miss Willella,’ I says; ‘let’s hear how you make ’em. Pancakes is just whirling in my head like wagon wheels. Start her off, now⁠—pound of flour, eight dozen eggs, and so on. How does the catalogue of constituents run?’

“ ‘Excuse me for a moment, please,’ says Miss Willella, and she gives me a quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool. She ambled out into the other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his shirt sleeves, with a pitcher of water. He turns around to get a glass on the table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket. ‘Great post-toles!’ thinks I, ‘but here’s a family thinks a heap of cooking receipts, protecting it with firearms. I’ve known outfits that wouldn’t do that much by a family feud.’

“ ‘Drink this here down,’ says Uncle Emsley, handing me the glass of water. ‘You’ve rid too far today, Jud, and got yourself overexcited. Try to think about something else now.’

“ ‘Do you know how to make them pancakes, Uncle Emsley?’ I asked.

“ ‘Well, I’m not as apprised in the anatomy of them as some,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘but I reckon you take a sifter of plaster of Paris and a little dough and saleratus and corn meal, and mix ’em with eggs and buttermilk as usual. Is old Bill going to ship beeves to Kansas City again this spring, Jud?’

“That was all the pancake specifications I could get that night. I didn’t wonder that Jackson Bird found it uphill work. So I dropped the subject and talked with Uncle Emsley for a while about hollow-horn and cyclones. And then Miss Willella came and said ‘Good night,’ and I hit the breeze for the ranch.

“About a week afterward I met Jackson Bird riding out of Pimienta as I rode in, and we stopped on the road for a few frivolous remarks.

“ ‘Got the bill of particulars for them flapjacks yet?’ I asked him.

“ ‘Well, no,’ says Jackson. ‘I don’t seem to have any success in getting hold of it. Did you try?’

“ ‘I did,’ says I, ‘and ’twas like trying to dig a prairie dog out of his hole with a peanut hull. That pancake receipt must be a jookalorum, the way they hold on to it.’

“ ‘I’m most ready to give it up,’ says Jackson, so discouraged in his pronunciations that I felt sorry for him; ‘but I did want to know how to make them pancakes to eat on my lonely ranch,’ says he. ‘I lie awake at nights thinking how good they are.’

“ ‘You keep on trying for it,’ I tells him, ‘and I’ll do the same. One of us is bound to get a rope over its horns before long. Well, so-oong, Jacksy.’

“You see, by this time we were on the peacefullest of terms. When I saw that he wasn’t after Miss Willella, I had more endurable contemplations of that sandy-haired snoozer. In order to help out the ambitions of his appetite I kept on trying to get that receipt from Miss Willella. But every time I would say ‘pancakes’ she would get sort of remote and fidgety about the eye, and try to change the subject. If I held her to it she would slide out and round up Uncle Emsley with his pitcher of water and hip-pocket howitzer.

“One day I galloped over to the store with a fine bunch of blue verbenas that I cut out of a herd of wild flowers over on Poisoned Dog Prairie. Uncle Emsley looked at ’em with one eye shut and says:

“ ‘Haven’t ye heard the news?’

“ ‘Cattle up?’ I asks.

“ ‘Willella and Jackson Bird was married in Palestine yesterday,’ says he. ‘Just got a letter this morning.’

“I dropped them flowers in a cracker-barrel, and let the news trickle