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

your clothes than to chin her back that way. Maybe it ain’t my butt-in, but it goes, anyhow⁠—you strike me as bein’ a whole lot to the wrong.”

The lady’s escort indulged in more elegantly expressed but fetching repartee. Corny, eschewing his truck driver’s vocabulary, retorted as nearly as he could in polite phrases. Then diplomatic relations were severed; there was a brief but lively set-to with other than oral weapons, from which Corny came forth easily victor.

A carriage dashed up, driven by a tardy and solicitous coachman.

“Will you kindly open the door for me?” asked the lady. Corny assisted her to enter, and took off his hat. The escort was beginning to scramble up from the sidewalk.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” said Corny, “if he’s your man.”

“He’s no man of mine,” said the lady. “Perhaps he⁠—but there’s no chance of his being now. Drive home, Michael. If you care to take this⁠—with my thanks.”

Three red roses were thrust out through the carriage window into Corny’s hand. He took them, and the hand for an instant; and then the carriage sped away.

Corny gathered his foe’s hat and began to brush the dust from his clothes.

“Come along,” said Corny, taking the other man by the arm.

His late opponent was yet a little dazed by the hard knocks he had received. Corny led him carefully into a saloon three doors away.

“The drinks for us,” said Corny, “me and my friend.”

“You’re a queer feller,” said the lady’s late escort⁠—“lick a man and then want to set ’em up.”

“You’re my best friend,” said Corny exultantly. “You don’t understand? Well, listen. You just put me wise to somethin’. I been playin’ gent a long time, thinkin’ it was just the glad rags I had and nothin’ else. Say⁠—you’re a swell, ain’t you? Well, you trot in that class, I guess. I don’t; but I found out one thing⁠—I’m a gentleman, by⁠—and I know it now. What’ll you have to drink?”

The Door of Unrest

I sat an hour by sun, in the editor’s room of the Montopolis Weekly Bugle. I was the editor.

The saffron rays of the declining sunlight filtered through the cornstalks in Micajah Widdup’s garden-patch, and cast an amber glory upon my paste-pot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies. The room, with its one window, was already a prey to the twilight. One by one, with my trenchant sentences, I lopped off the heads of the political hydra, while I listened, full of kindly peace, to the homecoming cowbells and wondered what Mrs. Flanagan was going to have for supper.

Then in from the dusky, quiet street there drifted and perched himself upon a corner of my desk old Father Time’s younger brother. His face was beardless and as gnarled as an English walnut. I never saw clothes such as he wore. They would have reduced Joseph’s coat to a monochrome. But the colours were not the dyer’s. Stains and patches and the work of sun and rust were responsible for the diversity. On his coarse shoes was the dust, conceivably, of a thousand leagues. I can describe him no further, except to say that he was little and weird and old⁠—old I began to estimate in centuries when I saw him. Yes, and I remember that there was an odour, a faint odour like aloes, or possibly like myrrh or leather; and I thought of museums.

And then I reached for a pad and pencil, for business is business, and visits of the oldest inhabitants are sacred and honourable, requiring to be chronicled.

“I am glad to see you, sir,” I said. “I would offer you a chair, but⁠—you see, sir,” I went on, “I have lived in Montopolis only three weeks, and I have not met many of our citizens.” I turned a doubtful eye upon his dust-stained shoes, and concluded with a newspaper phrase, “I suppose that you reside in our midst?”

My visitor fumbled in his raiment, drew forth a soiled card, and handed it to me. Upon it was written, in plain but unsteadily formed characters, the name “Michob Ader.”

“I am glad you called, Mr. Ader,” I said. “As one of our older citizens, you must view with pride the recent growth and enterprise of Montopolis. Among other improvements, I think I can promise that the town will now be provided with a live, enterprising newspa⁠—”

“Do ye know the name on that card?” asked my caller, interrupting me.

“It is not a familiar one to me,” I said.

Again he visited the depths of his ancient vestments. This time he brought out a torn leaf of some book or journal, brown and flimsy with age. The heading of the page was the Turkish Spy in old-style type; the printing upon it was this:

“There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have lived these sixteen hundred years. He says of himself that he was a shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader. The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying: ‘Go; why tarriest thou?’ The Messias answered him: ‘I indeed am going; but thou shalt tarry until I come’; thereby condemning him to live until the day of judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being then about thirty years of age.

“Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who relates⁠—” Here the printing ended.

I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew, for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.

“ ’Tis a