Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

“The young lady leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

“I dipped my brush in the lather and ran it across her upper lip. As soon as I did so she sprang to her feet, her eyes flashing with rage.

“ ‘How dare you insult me!’ she stormed, looking as if she would like to eat me up. ‘Leave the house, immediately,’ she went on.

“I was dumbfounded. I thought perhaps she was a trifle flighty, so I put up my utensils and started for the door. When I got there, I recovered my presence of mind enough to say:

“Miss, I am sure I have done nothing to offend you. I always try to act a gentleman whenever it is convenient. In what way have I insulted you?

“ ‘Take your departure,’ she said angrily. ‘I guess I know when a man kisses me.’

“And so I left. Now, what do you think of that?” asked the barber, as he pushed about an ounce of soap into the Post Man’s mouth with his thumb.

“I think that’s a pretty tough story to believe,” said the Post Man, summoning up his courage.

The barber stopped shaving and bent a gaze of such malignant and cool ferocity upon his victim that the Post Man hastened to say:

“But no doubt it occurred as you have stated.”

“It did,” said the barber. “I don’t ask you to take my word for it. I can prove it. Do you see that blue mug on the shelf, the third from the right? Well, that’s the mug I carried with me that day. I guess you’ll believe it now.”

“Speaking of bald heads,” went on the barber, although no one had said a word about bald heads, “reminds me of how a man worked a game on me once right here in Houston. You know there’s nothing in the world that will make hair grow on a bald head. Lots of things are sold for that purpose, but if the roots are dead nothing can bring them to life. A man came into my shop one day last fall and had a shave. His head was as bald and smooth as a tea cup. All the tonics in the world couldn’t have started one hair growing there. The man was a stranger to me, but said he ran a truck garden out on the edge of town. He came in about three times and got shaved and then he struck me to fix him up something to make his hair grow.”

The barber here reached back upon a shelf and got a strip of sticking plaster. Then he cut a gash along the Post Man’s chin and stuck the plaster over it.

“When a man asks for a hair tonic,” continued the barber, “in a barbershop he always gets it. You can fix up a mixture that a man may use on his head for a long time before he finds it is doing him no good. In the meantime he continues to shave in your shop.

“I told my customer that I had invented a hair tonic that if its use were persisted in would certainly cause the hair to grow on the smoothest head. I sat down and wrote him out a formula and told him to have it prepared at a drug store and not to give away the information, as I intended after a while to have it patented and sell it on a large scale. The recipe contained a lot of harmless stuff, some salts of tartar, oil of almonds, bay rum, rose water, tincture of myrrh and some other ingredients. I wrote them down at random just as they came into my head, and half an hour afterwards I couldn’t have told what it was composed of myself. The man took it, paid me a dollar for the formula and went off to get it filled at a drug store.

“He came back twice that week to get shaved, and he said he was using it faithfully. Then he didn’t come any more for about two weeks. He dropped in one afternoon and hung his hat up, and it nearly knocked me down when I saw that the finest kind of a suit of hair had started on his head. It was growing splendidly, and only two weeks before his head had been as bald as a door knob.

“He said he was awfully pleased with my tonic, and well he might be. While I was shaving him I tried to think what the ingredients were that I had written down for him to use, but I couldn’t remember the quantities or half the things I had used. I knew that I had accidentally struck upon a tonic that would make the hair grow, and I knew furthermore that that formula was worth a million dollars to any man if it would do the work. Making hair grow on bald heads, if it could be done, would be better than any gold mine ever worked. I made up my mind to have that formula. When he was about to start away I said carelessly:

“ ‘By the way, Mr. Plunket, I have mislaid my memorandum book that has the formula of my tonic in it and I want to have a bottle or two prepared this morning. If you have the one I gave you I’d like to make a copy of it while you are here.’

“I must have looked too anxious, for he looked at me for a few minutes and then broke out into a laugh.

“ ‘By Jiminy,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe you’ve got a copy of it anywheres. I believe you just happend to hit on the right thing and you don’t remember what it was. I ain’t half as green as I look. That hair grower is worth a fortune, and a big one, too. I think I’ll just keep my recipe and get somebody to put the stuff up and sell it.’

“He started out, and I called him into