Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

Jack is too full of exaltation and cane-juice to reply. He stops the disrobing business just short of the Manhattan Beach rules, and then winds them red-and-white shawls around him, and goes out and stands on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw. And I looks through a peek-hole to see what he is up to.

“In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. Danged if I wasn’t knocked a little silly when she got close, she looked so exactly much like Florence Blue Feather. ‘I wonder,’ says I to myself, ‘if she has been reincarcerated, too? If I could see,’ says I to myself, ‘whether she has a mole on her left⁠—’ But the next minute I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence; but she looked good at that. And High Jack hadn’t drunk all the rum that had been drank.

“The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and got down and massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then she went nearer and laid the flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack’s feet. Rummy as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions. Even a stone god ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him.

“And then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions a few words that sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the walls of the ruin. The girl gives a little jump backward, and her eyes fly open as big as doughnuts; but she don’t beat it.

“Why didn’t she? I’ll tell you why I think why. It don’t seem to a girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange, and startling that a stone god should come to life for her. If he was to do it for one of them snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now, it would be different⁠—but her! I’ll bet she said to herself: ‘Well, goodness me! you’ve been a long time getting on your job. I’ve half a mind not to speak to you.’

“But she and High Jack holds hands and walks away out of the temple together. By the time I’d had time to take another drink and enter upon the scene they was twenty yards away, going up the path in the woods that the girl had come down. With the natural scenery already in place, it was just like a play to watch ’em⁠—she looking up at him, and him giving her back the best that an Indian can hand, out in the way of a goo-goo eye. But there wasn’t anything in that recarnification and revulsion to tintype for me.

“ ‘Hey! Injun!’ I yells out to High Jack. ‘We’ve got a board-bill due in town, and you’re leaving me without a cent. Brace up and cut out the Neapolitan fisher-maiden, and let’s go back home.’

“But on the two goes; without looking once back until, as you might say, the forest swallowed ’em up. And I never saw or heard of High Jack Snakefeeder from that day to this. I don’t know if the Cherokees came from the Aspics; but if they did, one of ’em went back.

“All I could do was to hustle back to that Boca place and panhandle Major Bing. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me a ticket home. And I’m back again on the job at Chubb’s, sir, and I’m going to hold it steady. Come round, and you’ll find the steaks as good as ever.”

I wondered what Hunky Magee thought about his own story; so I asked him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification and such mysteries as he had touched upon.

“Nothing like that,” said Hunky, positively. “What ailed High Jack was too much booze and education. They’ll do an Indian up every time.”

“But what about Miss Blue Feather?” I persisted.

“Say,” said Hunky, with a grin, “that little lady that stole High Jack certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her, but it was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that Miss Florence Blue Feather disappeared from home about a year ago? Well, where she landed four days later was in as neat a five-room flat on East Twenty-third Street as you ever walked sideways through⁠—and she’s been Mrs. Magee ever since.”

The Third Ingredient

The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and headgear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa’s roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wiretappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the doorbell rings.

This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians⁠—though meaning no disrespect to the others.

At six o’clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely chiselled.

And now for Hetty’s thumbnail biography while she climbs the two flights of stairs.

She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to have justified the horseback