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

“Miss Boyne,” he said, “let me present Mr. Kinsolving, the son of the man who put bread up five years ago. He thinks he would like to do something to aid those who where inconvenienced by that act.”

The smile left the young woman’s face. She rose and pointed her forefinger toward the door. This time she looked Kinsolving straight in the eye, but it was not a look that gave delight.

The two men went down Varick Street. Kenwitz, letting all his pessimism and rancor and hatred of the Octopus come to the surface, gibed at the moneyed side of his friend in an acrid torrent of words. Dan appeared to be listening, and then turned to Kenwitz and shook hands with him warmly.

“I’m obliged to you, Ken, old man,” he said, vaguely⁠—“a thousand times obliged.”

“Mein Gott! you are crazy!” cried the watchmaker, dropping his spectacles for the first time in years.

Two months afterward Kenwitz went into a large bakery on lower Broadway with a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses that he had mended for the proprietor.

A lady was giving an order to a clerk as Kenwitz passed her.

“These loaves are ten cents,” said the clerk.

“I always get them at eight cents uptown,” said the lady. “You need not fill the order. I will drive by there on my way home.”

The voice was familiar. The watchmaker paused.

“Mr. Kenwitz!” cried the lady, heartily. “How do you do?”

Kenwitz was trying to train his socialistic and economic comprehension on her wonderful fur boa and the carriage waiting outside.

“Why, Miss Boyne!” he began.

“Mrs. Kinsolving,” she corrected. “Dan and I were married a month ago.”

Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: “If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe⁠—you can’t count ’em!”

Two years afterward I found that I couldn’t remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver’s advice.

I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.

“Paresis or superannuated?” I asks him.

“Hello, Billy,” says Silver; “I’m glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness. I’ve been saving New York for dessert. I know it’s a low-down trick to take things from these people. They only know this and that and pass to and fro and think ever and anon. I’d hate for my mother to know I was skinning these weak-minded ones. She raised me better.”

“Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that does skin grafting?” I asks.

“Well, no,” says Silver; “you needn’t back Epidermis to win today. I’ve only been here a month. But I’m ready to begin; and the members of Willie Manhattan’s Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well send their photos to the Evening Daily.

“I’ve been studying the town,” says Silver, “and reading the papers every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an O’Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my room and I’ll tell you. We’ll work the town together, Billy, for the sake of old times.”

Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects lying about.

“There’s more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,” says Silver, “than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, SC. They’ll bite at anything. The brains of most of ’em commute. The wiser they are in intelligence the less perception of cognizance they have. Why, didn’t a man the other day sell J. P. Morgan an oil portrait of Rockefeller, Jr., for Andrea del Sarto’s celebrated painting of the young Saint John!

“You see that bundle of printed stuff in the corner, Billy? That’s gold mining stock. I started out one day to sell that, but I quit it in two hours. Why? Got arrested for blocking the street. People fought to buy it. I sold the policeman a block of it on the way to the station-house, and then I took it off the market. I don’t want people to give me their money. I want some little consideration connected with the transaction to keep my pride from being hurt. I want ’em to guess the missing letter in Chic⁠—go, or draw to a pair of nines before they pay me a cent of money.

“Now there’s another little scheme that worked so easy I had to quit it. You see that bottle of blue ink on the table? I tattooed an anchor on the back of my hand and went to a bank and told ’em I was Admiral Dewey’s nephew. They offered to cash my draft on him for a thousand, but I didn’t know my uncle’s first name. It shows, though, what an easy town it is. As for burglars, they won’t go in a house now unless there’s a hot supper ready and a few college students to wait on ’em. They’re slugging citizens all over the upper part of the city and I guess, taking the town from end to end, it’s a plain case of assault and Battery.”

“Monty,” says I, when Silver had slacked, up, “you may have Manhattan correctly discriminated in your perorative, but I doubt it. I’ve only been in town two hours,