Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

can do wonders for the other fellow? You was about to get me with your financial proposition; but we’ve all got our weak points. Timotea’s mine. And, say!” Trotter had turned to leave, but he retraced the step or two that he had taken. “I like to have left you without saying goodbye,” said he. “It kind of rattles you when they go away unexpected for a month and come back the same way. Shake hands. So long! Say, do you remember them gunshots we heard a while ago up at the cuartel? Well, I knew what they was, but I didn’t mention it. It was Clifford Wainwright being shot by a squad of soldiers against a stone wall for giving away secrets of state to that Nicamala republic. Oh, yes, it was rum that did it. He backslided and got his. I guess we all have our weak points, and can’t do much toward helping ourselves. Mine’s waiting for me. I’d have liked to have that job with your brother, but⁠—we’ve all got our weak points. So long!” IV

A big black Carib carried me on his back through the surf to the ship’s boat. On the way the purser handed me a letter that he had brought for me at the last moment from the post-office in Aguas Frescas. It was from my brother. He requested me to meet him at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans and accept a position with his house⁠—in either cotton, sugar, or sheetings, and with five thousand dollars a year as my salary.

When I arrived at the Crescent City I hurried away⁠—far away from the St. Charles to a dim chambre garnie in Bienville Street. And there, looking down from my attic window from time to time at the old, yellow, absinthe house across the street, I wrote this story to buy my bread and butter.

“Can thim that helps others help thimselves?”

Supply and Demand

Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat needs to be cleaned again.

Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between twenty and forty. You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street. When business is slack he likes to talk, so I had my hat cleaned even oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of the sweatshops.

One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to anoint my headpiece de Panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust and dirt like a magnet.

“They say the Indians weave ’em under water,” said I, for a leader.

“Don’t you believe it,” said Finch. “No Indian or white man could stay under water that long. Say, do you pay much attention to politics? I see in the paper something about a law they’ve passed called ‘the law of supply and demand.’ ”

I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a politico-economical law, and not to a legal statute.

“I didn’t know,” said Finch. “I heard a good deal about it a year or so ago, but in a one-sided way.”

“Yes,” said I, “political orators use it a great deal. In fact, they never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those cart-tail fellows spouting on the subject over here on the east side.”

“I heard it from a king,” said Finch⁠—“the white king of a tribe of Indians in South America.”

I was interested but not surprised. The big city is like a mother’s knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the doorstep. I know a piano player in a cheap café who has shot lions in Africa, a bellboy who fought in the British army against the Zulus, an express-driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster’s claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in sight. So a hat-cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress me.

“A new band?” asked Finch, with his dry, barren smile.

“Yes,” said I, “and half an inch wider.” I had had a new band five days before.

“I meets a man one night,” said Finch, beginning his story⁠—“a man brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating schweinerknuckel in Schlagel’s. That was two years ago, when I was a hose-cart driver for No. 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain mountains in a country down South that he calls Gaudymala is full of it. He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities.

“ ‘Oh, Geronimo!’ says I. ‘Indians! There’s no Indians in the South,’ I tell him, ‘except Elks, Maccabees, and the buyers for the fall dry-goods trade. The Indians are all on the reservations,’ says I.

“ ‘I’m telling you this with reservations,’ says he. ‘They ain’t Buffalo Bill Indians; they’re squattier and more pedigreed. They call ’em Inkers and Aspics, and they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was King of Mexico. They wash the gold out of the mountain streams,’ says the brown man, ‘and fill quills with it; and then they empty ’em into red jars till they are full; and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one arroba each⁠—an arroba is twenty-five pounds⁠—and store it in a stone house, with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair, playing a flute, over the door.’

“ ‘How do they work off this unearth increment?’ I asks.

“ ‘They don’t,’ says the man. ‘It’s a case of “Ill fares the land with the great deal of velocity where wealth accumulates and there ain’t any reciprocity.” ’

“After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I