Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of a fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?” he ended, with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.

“Listen,” said I. “At last you have struck upon the right note. What would she think of me? Listen,” I repeated.

“There are women,” I said, “who look upon horsehair sofas and currant wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of your well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the young men who would win them.

“One such as they,” I said, “is waiting. Only a fool would try to win a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias, and to gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe. Do not be a coward as well as a chatterer at a lady’s tea-table.”

“There, there!” said Devoe, falteringly. “You know me, don’t you, Rayburn?”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I know you. I know you. I know you. But the basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk back and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we have a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad form. But the basket is waiting for your head.”

With that he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself as a gentleman not to make a row.

But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.

It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still, and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and shut thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet with the drip, but what did that matter? With delight I felt under my hands the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed beard.

I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe into the basket that still hung by the nail in the doorjamb. I sat in a chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two hours of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.

“Where have you been, Tommy?” she asked. “You were gone when I came out.”

“Look in the basket,” I said, rising to my feet. She looked, and gave a little scream⁠—of delight, I was pleased to note.

“Oh, Tommy!” she said. “It was just what I wanted you to do. It’s leaking a little, but that doesn’t matter. Wasn’t I telling you? It’s the little things that count. And you remembered.”

Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.

“Little things, indeed!” I thought again. “The headhunters are right. These are the things that women like you to do for them.”

Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.

“You think of me,” she said. “You are the man I was describing. You think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You please me very well, Tommy.”

I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead, and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe’s apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried coconut.

“There will be coconut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy,” said Chloe, gayly, “and you must come. I must go in for a little while.”

She vanished in a delightful flutter.

Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it were his own property that I had escaped with.

“You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!” he said, angrily. “Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you’ve been doing!⁠—and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledgehammer.”

“Name some of them,” said I.

“Devoe sent for me,” said Stamford. “He saw you from his window go to old Campos’ store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and then come back and make off with his biggest coconut.”

“It’s the little things that count, after all,” said I.

“It’s your little bed that counts with you just now,” said the doctor. “You come with me at once, or I’ll throw up the case. ‘You’re as loony as a loon.”

So I got no coconut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust as to the value of the method of the headhunters. Perhaps for many centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and lesser