Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

his effective conclusion when he aroused me by continuing:

“Of course,” said he, “our schemes were at an end. There was no one to take Don Rafael’s place. Our little army melted away like dew before the sun.

“One day after I had returned to New Orleans I related this story to a friend who holds a professorship in Tulane University.

“When I had finished he laughed and asked whether I had any knowledge of Kearny’s luck afterward. I told him no, that I had seen him no more; but that when he left me, he had expressed confidence that his future would be successful now that his unlucky star had been overthrown.

“ ‘No doubt,’ said the professor, ‘he is happier not to know one fact. If he derives his bad luck from Phoebe, the ninth satellite of Saturn, that malicious lady is still engaged in overlooking his career. The star close to Saturn that he imagined to be her was near that planet simply by the chance of its orbit⁠—probably at different times he has regarded many other stars that happened to be in Saturn’s neighbourhood as his evil one. The real Phoebe is visible only through a very good telescope.’

“About a year afterward,” continued Captain Maloné, “I was walking down a street that crossed the Poydras Market. An immensely stout, pink-faced lacy in black satin crowded me from the narrow sidewalk with a frown. Behind her trailed a little man laden to the gunwales with bundles and bags of goods and vegetables.

“It was Kearny⁠—but changed. I stopped and shook one of his hands, which still clung to a bag of garlic and red peppers.

“ ‘How is the luck, old compañero?’ I asked him. I had not the heart to tell him the truth about his star.

“ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I am married, as you may guess.’

“ ‘Francis!’ called the big lady, in deep tones, ‘are you going to stop in the street talking all day?’

“ ‘I am coming, Phoebe dear,’ said Kearny, hastening after her.”

Captain Maloné ceased again.

“After all, do you believe in luck?” I asked.

“Do you?” answered the captain, with his ambiguous smile shaded by the brim of his soft straw hat.

“Next to Reading Matter”

He compelled my interest as he stepped from the ferry at Desbrosses Street. He had the air of being familiar with hemispheres and worlds, and of entering New York as the lord of a demesne who revisited it in after years of absence. But I thought that, with all his air, he had never before set foot on the slippery cobblestones of the City of Too Many Caliphs.

He wore loose clothes of a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic headgear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling⁠—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman’s vase. As he afterward told me, his name was Judson Tate; and he may as well be called so at once. He wore his green silk tie through a topaz ring; and he carried a cane made of the vertebrae of a shark.

Judson Tate accosted me with some large and casual inquiries about the city’s streets and hotels, in the manner of one who had but for the moment forgotten the trifling details. I could think of no reason for disparaging my own quiet hotel in the downtown district; so the mid-morning of the night found us already victualed and drinked (at my expense), and ready to be chaired and tobaccoed in a quiet corner of the lobby.

There was something on Judson Tate’s mind, and, such as it was, he tried to convey it to me. Already he had accepted me as his friend; and when I looked at his great, snuff-brown first-mate’s hand, with which he brought emphasis to his periods, within six inches of my nose, I wondered if, by any chance, he was as sudden in conceiving enmity against strangers.

When this man began to talk I perceived in him a certain power. His voice was a persuasive instrument, upon which he played with a somewhat specious but effective art. He did not try to make you forget his ugliness; he flaunted it in your face and made it part of the charm of his speech. Shutting your eyes, you would have trailed after this rat-catcher’s pipes at least to the walls of Hamelin. Beyond that you would have had to be more childish to follow. But let him play his own tune to the words set down, so that if all is too dull, the art of music may bear the blame.

“Women,” said Judson Tate, “are mysterious creatures.”

My spirits sank. I was not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis⁠—to such a timeworn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry⁠—to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive methods, for the purpose of augmenting, furthering, and reinforcing their own charms and designs.

“Oh, I don’t know!” said I, vernacularly.

“Have you ever heard of Oratama?” he asked.

“Possibly,” I answered. “I seem to recall a toe dancer⁠—or a suburban addition⁠—or was it a perfume?⁠—of some such name.”

“It is a town,” said Judson Tate, “on the coast of a foreign country of which you know nothing and could understand less. It is a country governed by a dictator and controlled by revolutions and insubordination. It was there that a great life-drama was played, with Judson Tate, the homeliest man in America, and Fergus McMahan, the handsomest adventurer in history or fiction, and Señorita Anabela Zamora, the beautiful daughter of the alcalde of Oratama, as chief actors. And, another thing⁠—nowhere else on the globe except in the