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

Orleans, and there took a tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the ship had run against that name in the dark!

“ ‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.

“ ‘We will find ruins here or make ’em,’ says High. ‘The Government doesn’t care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.’

“Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read about⁠—Tired and Siphon⁠—after they was destroyed, they must have looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on the stone courthouse by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of ’em was light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn’t have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers. We wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found out that it was Major Bing.

“Major Bing was the ointment around the fly. He had the cochineal, sarsaparilla, logwood, annatto, hemp, and all other dyewoods and pure food adulteration concessions cornered. He had five-sixths of the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares. It was a beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others of our wisest when I was in the provinces⁠—but now no more. That peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without even the observation tower showing.

“Major Bing’s idea was this. He had the population go forth into the forest and gather these products. When they brought ’em in he gave ’em one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes they’d strike and demand a sixth. The Major always gave in to ’em.

“The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him and High Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till midnight. He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and High and me could stay with him forever if we would. But High Jack happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.

“ ‘Ruins!’ says Major Bing. ‘The woods are full of ’em. I don’t know how far they date back, but they was here before I came.’

“High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are addicted to.

“ ‘Why,’ says the Major, rubbing his nose, ‘I can’t hardly say. I imagine it’s infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that. There’s a church here⁠—a Methodist or some other kind⁠—with a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don’t assimilate except on state occasions. I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But Skidder says he has ’em in the fold.’

“A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles. Then a branch turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against the finest ruin you ever saw⁠—solid stone with trees and vines and underbrush all growing up against it and in it and through it. All over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would have been arrested if they’d ever come out in vaudeville that way. We approached it from the rear.

“High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in Boca. You know how an Indian is⁠—the palefaces fixed his clock when they introduced him to firewater. He’d brought a quart along with him.

“ ‘Hunky,’ says he, ‘we’ll explore the ancient temple. It may be that the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology,’ says he, ‘may yet profit by the vagaries of wind and tide.’

“We went in the rear door of the bum edifice. We struck a kind of alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport, and a stone washstand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood pegs drove into holes in the wall, and that was all. To go out of that furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East Side Settlement house.

“While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the stonemasons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor, six little windows like square portholes that didn’t let much light in.

“I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack’s face three feet away.

“ ‘High,’ says I, ‘of all the⁠—’

“And then I noticed he looked funny, and I turned around.

“He’d taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn’t seem to hear me. I touched him, and came near beating it. High Jack had turned to stone. I had been drinking some rum myself.

“ ‘Ossified!’ I says to him, loudly. ‘I knew what would happen if you kept it up.’

“And then High Jack comes in from the alcove when he hears me conversing with nobody, and we have a look at Mr. Snakefeeder No. 2. It’s a stone idol, or god, or revised statute or something, and it looks as much like High Jack as one green pea looks like itself. It’s got exactly his face and size and color, but it’s steadier on its pins. It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see it’s been there ten million years.

“ ‘He’s a cousin of mine,’ sings High, and