Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

“The girl was all broke up. She had a handkerchief to her face, and kept saying every little bit, ‘Oh, father, father!’ She walked up to me and laid her lily-white hand on the clothes that had pained her at first. I smelt a million violets. She was a lulu. I told her I came in a private yacht.

“ ‘Mr. O’Day,’ she says. ‘Oh, take us away from this horrid country at once. Can you! Will you! Say you will.’

“ ‘I’ll try,’ I said, concealing the fact that I was dying to get them on salt water before they could change their mind.

“One thing they both kicked against was going through the town to the boat landing. Said they dreaded publicity, and now that they were going to return, they had a hope that the thing might yet be kept out of the papers. They swore they wouldn’t go unless I got them out to the yacht without anyone knowing it, so I agreed to humour them.

“The sailors who rowed me ashore were playing billiards in a barroom near the water, waiting for orders, and I proposed to have them take the boat down the beach half a mile or so, and take us up there. How to get them word was the question, for I couldn’t leave the grip with the prisoner, and I couldn’t take it with me, not knowing but what the monkeys might stick me up.

“The young lady says the old coloured woman would take them a note. I sat down and wrote it, and gave it to the dame with plain directions what to do, and she grins like a baboon and shakes her head.

“Then Mr. Wahrfield handed her a string of foreign dialect, and she nods her head and says, ‘See, señor,’ maybe fifty times, and lights out with the note.

“ ‘Old Augusta only understands German,’ said Miss Wahrfield, smiling at me. ‘We stopped in her house to ask where we could find lodging, and she insisted upon our having coffee. She tells us she was raised in a German family in San Domingo.’

“ ‘Very likely,’ I said. ‘But you can search me for German words, except nix verstay and noch einst. I would have called that “See, señor” French, though, on a gamble.’

“Well, we three made a sneak around the edge of town so as not to be seen. We got tangled in vines and ferns and the banana bushes and tropical scenery a good deal. The monkey suburbs was as wild as places in Central Park. We came out on the beach a good half mile below. A brown chap was lying asleep under a coconut tree, with a ten-foot musket beside him. Mr. Wahrfield takes up the gun and pitches it into the sea. ‘The coast is guarded,’ he says. ‘Rebellion and plots ripen like fruit.’ He pointed to the sleeping man, who never stirred. ‘Thus,’ he says, ‘they perform trusts. Children!’

“I saw our boat coming, and I struck a match and lit a piece of newspaper to show them where we were. In thirty minutes we were on board the yacht.

“The first thing, Mr. Wahrfield and his daughter and I took the grip into the owner’s cabin, opened it up, and took an inventory. There was one hundred and five thousand dollars, United States treasury notes, in it, besides a lot of diamond jewelry and a couple of hundred Havana cigars. I gave the old man the cigars and a receipt for the rest of the lot, as agent for the company, and locked the stuff up in my private quarters.

“I never had a pleasanter trip than that one. After we got to sea the young lady turned out to be the jolliest ever. The very first time we sat down to dinner, and the steward filled her glass with champagne⁠—that director’s yacht was a regular floating Waldorf-Astoria⁠—she winks at me and says, ‘What’s the use to borrow trouble, Mr. Fly Cop? Here’s hoping you may live to eat the hen that scratches on your grave.’ There was a piano on board, and she sat down to it and sung better than you give up two cases to hear plenty times. She knew about nine operas clear through. She was sure enough bon ton and swell. She wasn’t one of the ‘among others present’ kind; she belonged on the special mention list!

“The old man, too, perked up amazingly on the way. He passed the cigars, and says to me once, quite chipper, out of a cloud of smoke, ‘Mr. O’Day, somehow I think the Republic Company will not give me the much trouble. Guard well the gripvalise of the money, Mr. O’Day, for that it must be returned to them that it belongs when we finish to arrive.’

“When we landed in New York I phoned to the chief to meet us in that director’s office. We got in a cab and went there. I carried the grip, and we walked in, and I was pleased to see that the chief had got together that same old crowd of moneybugs with pink faces and white vests to see us march in. I set the grip on the table. ‘There’s the money,’ I said.

“ ‘And your prisoner?’ said the chief.

“I pointed to Mr. Wahrfield, and he stepped forward and says:

“ ‘The honour of a word with you, sir, to explain.’

“He and the chief went into another room and stayed ten minutes. When they came back the chief looked as black as a ton of coal.

“ ‘Did this gentleman,’ he says to me, ‘have this valise in his possession when you first saw him?’

“ ‘He did,’ said I.

“The chief took up the grip and handed it to the prisoner with a bow, and says to the director crowd: ‘Do any of you recognize this gentleman?’

“They all shook their pink faces.

“ ‘Allow me to present,’ he goes on, Señor Miraflores, president of the republic of Anchuria. The señor has generously consented to overlook this outrageous blunder, on condition that we