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

to be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and Harry Thurston Peck like to handle. But, somehow, I can’t strike just the answer. Bill Watson may, and he may not. Tomorrow will tell. Well, Your Majesty, I’m glad anyhow that you butted in and whiled the time away. I guess Mr. Al Rashid himself would have bounced back if one of his constituents had conducted him up against this riddle. I’ll say good night. Peace fo’ yours, and what-you-may-call-its of Allah.”

The Margrave, still with a gloomy air, held out his hand.

“I cannot express my regret,” he said, sadly. “Never before have I found myself unable to assist in some way. ‘What kind of a hen lays the longest?’ It is a baffling problem. There is a hen, I believe, called the Plymouth Rock that⁠—”

“Cut it out,” said the young man. “The Caliph trade is a mighty serious one. I don’t suppose you’d even see anything funny in a preacher’s defense of John D. Rockefeller. Well, good night, Your Nibs.”

From habit the Margrave began to fumble in his pockets. He drew forth a card and handed it to the young man.

“Do me the favor to accept this, anyhow,” he said. “The time may come when it might be of use to you.”

“Thanks!” said the young man, pocketing it carelessly. “My name is Simmons.”

Shame to him who would hint that the reader’s interest shall altogether pursue the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg. I am indeed astray if my hand fail in keeping the way where my peruser’s heart would follow. Then let us, on the morrow, peep quickly in at the door of Hildebrant, harness maker.

Hildebrant’s 200 pounds reposed on a bench, silver-buckling a raw leather martingale.

Bill Watson came in first.

“Vell,” said Hildebrant, shaking all over with the vile conceit of the joke-maker, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?’ ”

“Er⁠—why, I think so,” said Bill, rubbing a servile chin. “I think so, Mr. Hildebrant⁠—the one that lives the longest⁠—Is that right?”

“Nein!” said Hildebrant, shaking his head violently. “You haf not guessed der answer.”

Bill passed on and donned a bed-tick apron and bachelorhood.

In came the young man of the Arabian Night’s fiasco⁠—pale, melancholy, hopeless.

“Vell,” said Hildebrant, “haf you guessed him? ‘Vat kind of a hen lays der longest?’ ”

Simmons regarded him with dull savagery in his eye. Should he curse this mountain of pernicious humor⁠—curse him and die? Why should⁠—But there was Laura.

Dogged, speechless, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and stood. His hand encountered the strange touch of the Margrave’s card. He drew it out and looked at it, as men about to be hanged look at a crawling fly. There was written on it in Quigg’s bold, round hand: “Good for one roast chicken to bearer.”

Simmons looked up with a flashing eye.

“A dead one!” said he.

“Goot!” roared Hildebrant, rocking the table with giant glee. “Dot is right! You gome at mine house at 8 o’clock to der party.”

The Plutonian Fire

There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.

They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest copy of Le Petit Journal, right side up⁠—you can tell by the illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in editors’ offices.

Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS. story beginning thus: “While the cheers following his nomination were still ringing through the old courthouse, Harwood broke away from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to Judge Creswell’s house to find Ida.”

Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction. The Southern papers had printed eight of his stories under an editorial caption identifying the author as the son of “the gallant Major Pettingill Pettit, our former County Attorney and hero of the battle of Lookout Mountain.”

Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shamefaced culture, and my good friend. His father kept a general store in a little town called Hosea. Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329. That’s nothing. We all do that. And some day when we make a hit with the little sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor prints the other one for us⁠—or “on us,” as the saying is⁠—and then⁠—and then we have to get a big valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners. At $1.25 everybody