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

and $3 lots. And the bald and inviolate cranium of President Atterbury shines with enthusiasm and demerit, while Colonel Tecumseh Pickens, the rude but reputable Croesus of the West, consumes so many apples that the peelings hang to the floor from the mahogany garbage chest that he calls his desk.

Just as Atterbury said, we ran along about three months without being troubled. Buck cashed the paper as fast as it came in and kept the money in a safe deposit vault a block or so away. Buck never thought much of banks for such purposes. We paid the interest regular on the stock we’d sold, so there was nothing for anybody to squeal about. We had nearly $50,000 on hand and all three of us had been living as high as prize fighters out of training.

One morning, as me and Buck sauntered into the office, fat and flippant, from our noon grub, we met an easy-looking fellow, with a bright eye and a pipe in his mouth, coming out. We found Atterbury looking like he’d been caught a mile from home in a wet shower.

“Know that man?” he asked us.

We said we didn’t.

“I don’t either,” says Atterbury, wiping off his head; “but I’ll bet enough Gold Bonds to paper a cell in the Tombs that he’s a newspaper reporter.”

“What did he want?” asks Buck.

“Information,” says our president. “Said he was thinking of buying some stock. He asked me about nine hundred questions, and every one of ’em hit some sore place in the business. I know he’s on a paper. You can’t fool me. You see a man about half shabby, with an eye like a gimlet, smoking cut plug, with dandruff on his coat collar, and knowing more than J. P. Morgan and Shakespeare put together⁠—if that ain’t a reporter I never saw one. I was afraid of this. I don’t mind detectives and post-office inspectors⁠—I talk to ’em eight minutes and then sell ’em stock⁠—but them reporters take the starch out of my collar. Boys, I recommend that we declare a dividend and fade away. The signs point that way.”

Me and Buck talked to Atterbury and got him to stop sweating and stand still. That fellow didn’t look like a reporter to us. Reporters always pull out a pencil and tablet on you, and tell you a story you’ve heard, and strikes you for the drinks. But Atterbury was shaky and nervous all day.

The next day me and Buck comes down from the hotel about ten-thirty. On the way we buys the papers, and the first thing we see is a column on the front page about our little imposition. It was a shame the way that reporter intimated that we were no blood relatives of the late George W. Childs. He tells all about the scheme as he sees it, in a rich, racy kind of a guying style that might amuse most anybody except a stockholder. Yes, Atterbury was right; it behooveth the gaily clad treasurer and the pearly pated president and the rugged vice-president of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company to go away real sudden and quick that their days might be longer upon the land.

Me and Buck hurries down to the office. We finds on the stairs and in the hall a crowd of people trying to squeeze into our office, which is already jammed full inside to the railing. They’ve nearly all got Golconda stock and Gold Bonds in their hands. Me and Buck judged they’d been reading the papers, too.

We stopped and looked at our stockholders, some surprised. It wasn’t quite the kind of a gang we supposed had been investing. They all looked like poor people; there was plenty of old women and lots of young girls that you’d say worked in factories and mills. Some was old men that looked like war veterans, and some was crippled, and a good many was just kids⁠—bootblacks and newsboys and messengers. Some was workingmen in overalls, with their sleeves rolled up. Not one of the gang looked like a stockholder in anything unless it was a peanut stand. But they all had Golconda stock and looked as sick as you please.

I saw a queer kind of a pale look come on Buck’s face when he sized up the crowd. He stepped up to a sickly looking woman and says: “Madam, do you own any of this stock?”

“I put in a hundred dollars,” says the woman, faint like. “It was all I had saved in a year. One of my children is dying at home now and I haven’t a cent in the house. I came to see if I could draw out some. The circulars said you could draw it at any time. But they say now I will lose it all.”

There was a smart kind of kid in the gang⁠—I guess he was a newsboy. “I got in twenty-fi’, mister,” he says, looking hopeful at Buck’s silk hat and clothes. “Dey paid me two-fifty a mont’ on it. Say, a man tells me dey can’t do dat and be on de square. Is dat straight? Do you guess I can get out my twenty-fi’?”

Some of the old women was crying. The factory girls was plumb distracted. They’d lost all their savings and they’d be docked for the time they lost coming to see about it.

There was one girl⁠—a pretty one⁠—in a red shawl, crying in a corner like her heart would dissolve. Buck goes over and asks her about it.

“It ain’t so much losing the money, mister,” says she, shaking all over, “though I’ve been two years saving it up; but Jakey won’t marry me now. He’ll take Rosa Steinfeld. I know J⁠—J⁠—Jakey. She’s got $400 in the savings bank. Ai, ai, ai⁠—” she sings out.

Buck looks all around with that same funny look on his face. And then we see leaning against the wall, puffing at his pipe, with his eye shining at us, this newspaper reporter.