Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

of pigs, I wouldn’t feel like I’d done my duty to the world unless I added that Berkshire to my collection. Not intrinsically, but according to the ethics of pigs as friends and coadjutors of mankind, I offer you five hundred dollars for the animal.’

“ ‘Jeff,’ says this pork esthete, ‘it ain’t money; it’s sentiment with me.’

“ ‘Seven hundred,’ says I.

“ ‘Make it eight hundred,’ says Rufe, ‘and I’ll crush the sentiment out of my heart.’

“I went under my clothes for my money-belt, and counted him out forty twenty-dollar gold certificates.

“ ‘I’ll just take him into my own room,’ says I, ‘and lock him up till after breakfast.’

“I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam calliope at the circus.

“ ‘Let me tote him in for you,’ says Rufe; and he picks up the beast under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him into my room like a sleeping baby.

“After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to Misfitzky’s and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper. I found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.

“I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skullcap, with a four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.

“ ‘Are you George B. Tapley?’ I asks.

“ ‘I swear it,’ says he.

“ ‘Well, I’ve got it,’ says I.

“ ‘Designate,’ says he. ‘Are you the guinea pigs for the Asiatic python or the alfalfa for the sacred buffalo?’

“ ‘Neither,’ says I. ‘I’ve got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this morning. I’ll take the five thousand dollars in large bills, if it’s handy.’

“George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went into one of the sideshows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man was feeding to him.

“ ‘Hey, Mac,’ calls G. B. ‘Nothing wrong with the worldwide this morning, is there?’

“ ‘Him? No,’ says the man. ‘He’s got an appetite like a chorus girl at 1 a.m.’

“ ‘How’d you get this pipe?’ says Tapley to me. ‘Eating too many pork chops last night?’

“I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.

“ ‘Fake,’ says he. ‘Don’t know anything about it. You’ve beheld with your own eyes the marvelous, worldwide porcine wonder of the four-footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal, unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.’

“I was beginning to see. I got in the wagon and told Uncle Ned to drive to the most adjacent orifice of the nearest alley. There I took out my pig, got the range carefully for the other opening, set his sights, and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the alley twenty feet ahead of his squeal.

“Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the advertising man to his window.

“ ‘To decide a bet,’ says I, ‘wasn’t the man who had this ad put in last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a clubfoot?’

“ ‘He was not,’ says the man. ‘He would measure about six feet by four and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies of the conservatory.’

“At dinner time I went back to Mrs. Peevy’s.

“ ‘Shall I keep some soup hot for Mr. Tatum till he comes back?’ she asks.

“ ‘If you do, ma’am,’ says I, ‘you’ll more than exhaust for firewood all the coal in the bosom of the earth and all the forests on the outside of it.’

“So there, you see,” said Jefferson Peters, in conclusion, “how hard it is ever to find a fair-minded and honest business-partner.”

“But,” I began, with the freedom of long acquaintance, “the rule should work both ways. If you had offered to divide the reward you would not have lost⁠—”

Jeff’s look of dignified reproach stopped me.

“That don’t involve the same principles at all,” said he. “Mine was a legitimate and moral attempt at speculation. Buy low and sell high⁠—don’t Wall Street endorse it? Bulls and bears and pigs⁠—what’s the difference? Why not bristles as well as horns and fur?”

Compliments of the Season

There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to very questionable sources⁠—facts and philosophy. We will begin with⁠—whichever you choose to call it.

Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rattrap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.

Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.

On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire’s palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, inexpensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded