Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

the land of adventure he usually came back to Chubb’s for a while. Chubb’s was a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn’t care for his description⁠—he was soft of voice and hard of face, and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a disturbance among Chubb’s customers.

One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw Hunky’s word-of-mouth blows⁠—it all came to something like this:

“Speaking of the next election,” said Hunky, “did you ever know much about Indians? No? I don’t mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or Laughing Water kind⁠—I mean the modern Indian⁠—the kind that takes Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the halfback on the other side in football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the ancestral wickiup.

“Well, they ain’t so bad. I like ’em better than most foreigners that have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own vices for them of the palefaces⁠—and he retains all his own virtues. Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets ’em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep their own vices⁠—and it’s going to take our whole standing army some day to police that gang.

“But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High Jack Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to visit rich guys’ houses in Boston and such places.

“There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue Feather⁠—but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn’t have told her from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then when High Jack wasn’t along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of⁠—let’s see⁠—eth⁠—yes, ethnology. That’s the art that goes back and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from jellyfish through monkeys and to the O’Briens. High Jack had took up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of riotous assemblies⁠—Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what made ’em like each other, I suppose. But I don’t know! What they call congeniality of tastes ain’t always it. Now, when Miss Blue Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german (well, if the Germans don’t nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I’d tell her about the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I’d heard the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn’t look much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.

“But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.

“About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he’d been commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins⁠—or something of that sort. And if I’d go along he could squeeze the price into the expense account.

“Well, I’d been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb’s about long enough then, so I wired High Jack ‘Yes’; and he sent me a ticket, and I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me. First of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from her home and environments.

“ ‘Run away?’ I asked.

“ ‘Vanished,’ says High Jack. ‘Disappeared like your shadow when the sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then she turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clue.’

“ ‘That’s bad⁠—that’s bad,’ says I. ‘She was a mighty nice girl, and as smart as you find em.’

“High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he’d referred the matter to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point⁠—and many another man’s. I’ve noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink either just before or just after it happens.

“From Washington we railroaded it to New