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

to revile the statue of the great navigator, unpatriotically rebuking him for having voyaged in search of land instead of liquids. Midnight overtook the party marooned in the rear of a cheap café far uptown.

Hedges was arrogant, overriding and quarrelsome. He was burly and tough, iron-gray but vigorous, “good” for the rest of the night. There was a dispute⁠—about nothing that matters⁠—and the five-fingered words were passed⁠—the words that represent the glove cast into the lists. Merriam played the role of the verbal Hotspur.

Hedges rose quickly, seized his chair, swung it once and smashed wildly down at Merriam’s head. Merriam dodged, drew a small revolver and shot Hedges in the chest. The leading roysterer stumbled, fell in a wry heap, and lay still.

Wade, a commuter, had formed that habit of promptness. He juggled Merriam out a side door, walked him to the corner, ran him a block and caught a hansom. They rode five minutes and then got out on a dark corner and dismissed the cab. Across the street the lights of a small saloon betrayed its hectic hospitality.

“Go in the back room of that saloon,” said Wade, “and wait. I’ll go find out what’s doing and let you know. You may take two drinks while I am gone⁠—no more.”

At ten minutes to one o’clock Wade returned. “Brace up, old chap,” he said. “The ambulance got there just as I did. The doctor says he’s dead. You may have one more drink. You let me run this thing for you. You’ve got to skip. I don’t believe a chair is legally a deadly weapon. You’ve got to make tracks, that’s all there is to it.”

Merriam complained of the cold querulously, and asked for another drink. “Did you notice what big veins he had on the back of his hands?” he said. “I never could stand⁠—I never could⁠—”

“Take one more,” said Wade, “and then come on. I’ll see you through.”

Wade kept his promise so well that at eleven o’clock the next morning Merriam, with a new suitcase full of new clothes and hairbrushes, stepped quietly on board a little 500-ton fruit steamer at an East River pier. The vessel had brought the season’s first cargo of limes from Port Limon, and was homeward bound. Merriam had his bank balance of $2,800 in his pocket in large bills, and brief instructions to pile up as much water as he could between himself and New York. There was no time for anything more.

From Port Limon Merriam worked down the coast by schooner and sloop to Colon, thence across the isthmus to Panama, where he caught a tramp bound for Callao and such intermediate ports as might tempt the discursive skipper from his course.

It was at La Paz that Merriam decided to land⁠—La Paz the Beautiful, a little harbourless town smothered in a living green ribbon that banded the foot of a cloud-piercing mountain. Here the little steamer stopped to tread water while the captain’s dory took him ashore that he might feel the pulse of the coconut market. Merriam went too, with his suitcase, and remained.

Kalb, the vice-consul, a Graeco-Armenian citizen of the United States, born in Hessen-Darmstadt, and educated in Cincinnati ward primaries, considered all Americans his brothers and bankers. He attached himself to Merriam’s elbow, introduced him to everyone in La Paz who wore shoes, borrowed ten dollars and went back to his hammock.

There was a little wooden hotel in the edge of a banana grove, facing the sea, that catered to the tastes of the few foreigners that had dropped out of the world into the triste Peruvian town. At Kalb’s introductory: “Shake hands with ⸻,” he had obediently exchanged manual salutations with a German doctor, one French and two Italian merchants, and three or four Americans who were spoken of as gold men, rubber men, mahogany men⁠—anything but men of living tissue.

After dinner Merriam sat in a corner of the broad front galeria with Bibb, a Vermonter interested in hydraulic mining, and smoked and drank Scotch “smoke.” The moonlit sea, spreading infinitely before him, seemed to separate him beyond all apprehension from his old life. The horrid tragedy in which he had played such a disastrous part now began, for the first time since he stole on board the fruiter, a wretched fugitive, to lose its sharper outlines. Distance lent assuagement to his view. Bibb had opened the floodgates of a stream of long-dammed discourse, overjoyed to have captured an audience that had not suffered under a hundred repetitions of his views and theories.

“One year more,” said Bibb, “and I’ll go back to God’s country. Oh, I know it’s pretty here, and you get dolce far niente handed to you in chunks, but this country wasn’t made for a white man to live in. You’ve got to have to plug through snow now and then, and see a game of baseball and wear a stiff collar and have a policeman cuss you. Still, La Paz is a good sort of a pipe-dreamy old hole. And Mrs. Conant is here. When any of us feels particularly like jumping into the sea we rush around to her house and propose. It’s nicer to be rejected by Mrs. Conant than it is to be drowned. And they say drowning is a delightful sensation.”

“Many like her here?” asked Merriam.

“Not anywhere,” said Bibb, with a comfortable sigh. She’s the only white woman in La Paz. The rest range from a dappled dun to the colour of a b-flat piano key. She’s been here a year. Comes from⁠—well, you know how a woman can talk⁠—ask ’em to say ‘string’ and they’ll say ‘crow’s foot’ or ‘cat’s cradle.’ Sometimes you’d think she was from Oshkosh, and again from Jacksonville, Florida, and the next day from Cape Cod.”

“Mystery?” ventured Merriam.

“M⁠—well, she looks it; but her talk’s translucent enough. But that’s a woman. I suppose if the Sphinx were to begin talking she’d merely say: ‘Goodness me! more visitors coming for dinner, and