Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

time since I’d known O’Connor, he laughed. He got up and roared and clapped his knees, and leaned against the wall till the tiles on the roof clattered to the noise of his lungs. He went into the back room and looked at himself in the glass and began and laughed all over from the beginning again. Then he looked at me and repeated himself. That’s why I asked you if you thought an Irishman had any humor. He’d been doing farce comedy from the day I saw him without knowing it; and the first time he had an idea advanced to him with any intelligence in it he acted like two twelfths of the sextet in a ‘Floradora’ road company.

“The next afternoon he comes in with a triumphant smile and begins to pull something like ticker tape out of his pocket.

“ ‘Great!’ says I. ‘This is something like home. How is Amalgamated Copper today?’

“ ‘I’ve got her name,’ says O’Connor, and he reads off something like this: ‘Dona Isabel Antonia Inez Lolita Carreras y Buencaminos y Monteleon. She lives with her mother,’ explains O’Connor. ‘Her father was killed in the last revolution. She is sure to be in sympathy with our cause.’

“And sure enough the next day she flung a little bunch of roses clear across the street into our door. O’Connor dived for it and found a piece of paper curled around a stem with a line in Spanish on it. He dragged the interpreter out of his corner and got him busy. The interpreter scratched his head, and gave us as a translation three best bets: ‘Fortune had got a face like the man fighting’; ‘Fortune looks like a brave man’; and ‘Fortune favors the brave.’ We put our money on the last one.

“ ‘Do ye see?’ says O’Connor. ‘She intends to encourage me sword to save her country.’

“ ‘It looks to me like an invitation to supper,’ says I.

“So every day this señorita sits behind the barred windows and exhausts a conservatory or two, one posy at a time. And O’Connor walks like a Dominecker rooster and swells his chest and swears to me he will win her by feats of arms and big deeds on the gory field of battle.

“By and by the revolution began to get ripe. One day O’Connor takes me into the back room and tells me all.

“ ‘Bowers,’ says he, ‘at twelve o’clock one week from today the struggle will take place. It has pleased ye to find amusement and diversion in this project because ye have not sense enough to perceive that it is easily accomplished by a man of courage, intelligence, and historical superiority, such as meself. The whole world over,’ says he, ‘the O’Connors have ruled men, women, and nations. To subdue a small and indifferent country like this is a trifle. Ye see what little, barefooted manikins the men of it are. I could lick four of ’em single-handed.’

“ ‘No doubt,’ says I. ‘But could you lick six? And suppose they hurled an army of seventeen against you?’

“ ‘Listen,’ says O’Connor, ‘to what will occur. At noon next Tuesday 25,000 patriots will rise up in the towns of the republic. The government will be absolutely unprepared. The public buildings will be taken, the regular army made prisoners, and the new administration set up. In the capital it will not be so easy on account of most of the army being stationed there. They will occupy the president’s palace and the strongly fortified government buildings and stand a siege. But on the very day of the outbreak a body of our troops will begin a march to the capital from every town as soon as the local victory has been won. The thing is so well planned that it is an impossibility for us to fail. I meself will lead the troops from here. The new president will be Señor Espadas, now Minister of Finance in the present cabinet.’

“ ‘What do you get?’ I asked.

“ ‘ ’Twill be strange,’ said O’Connor smiling, ‘if I don’t have all the jobs handed to me on a silver salver to pick what I choose. I’ve been the brains of the scheme, and when the fighting opens I guess I won’t be in the rear rank. Who managed it so our troops could get arms smuggled into this country? Didn’t I arrange it with a New York firm before I left there? Our financial agents inform me that 20,000 stands of Winchester rifles have been delivered a month ago at a secret place up coast and distributed among the towns. I tell you, Bowers, the game is already won.’

“Well, that kind of talk kind of shook my disbelief in the infallibility of the serious Irish gentleman soldier of fortune. It certainly seemed that the patriotic grafters had gone about the thing in a business way. I looked upon O’Connor with more respect, and began to figure on what kind of uniform I might wear as Secretary of War.

“Tuesday, the day set for the revolution, came around according to schedule. O’Connor said that a signal had been agreed upon for the uprising. There was an old cannon on the beach near the national warehouse. That had been secretly loaded and promptly at twelve o’clock was to be fired off. Immediately the revolutionists would seize their concealed arms, attack the comandante’s troops in the cuartel, and capture the customhouse and all government property and supplies.

“I was nervous all the morning. And about eleven o’clock O’Connor became infused with the excitement and martial spirit of murder. He geared his father’s sword around him, and walked up and down in the back room like a lion in the Zoo suffering from corns. I smoked a couple of dozen cigars, and decided on yellow stripes down the trouser legs of my uniform.

“At half-past eleven O’Connor asks me to take a short stroll through the streets to see if I could notice any signs of the uprising. I was back in fifteen minutes.

“ ‘Did you hear anything?’