Waifs and Strays
by O Henry
PART I
TWELVE STORIES
CONTENTS
The Red Roses of Tonia
Round The Circle
The Rubber Plant's Story
Out of Nazareth
Confessions of a Humorist
The Sparrows in Madison Square
Hearts and Hands
The Cactus
The Detective Detector
The Dog and the Playlet
A Little Talk About Mobs
The Snow Man
THE RED ROSES OF TONIA
A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The south-
bound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours.
On that train was Tonia Weaver's Easter hat.
Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a
buckboard from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a
shrugging shoulder and hands empty except for a cigarette. At
the small station, Nopal, he had learned of the delayed train and,
having no commands to wait, turned his ponies toward the ranch
again.
Now, if one supposes that Easter, the Goddess of Spring, cares any
more for the after-church parade on Fifth Avenue than she does for
her loyal outfit of subjects that assemble at the meeting-house at
Cactus, Tex., a mistake has been made. The wives and daughters of
the ranchmen of the Frio country put forth Easter blossoms of new
hats and gowns as faithfully as is done anywhere, and the Southwest
is, for one day, a mingling of prickly pear, Paris, and paradise.
And now it was Good Friday, and Tonia Weaver's Easter hat blushed
unseen in the desert air of an impotent express car, beyond the
burned trestle. On Saturday noon the Rogers girls, from the
Shoestring Ranch, and Ella Reeves, from the Anchor-O, and Mrs.
Bennet and Ida, from Green Valley, would convene at the Espinosa
and pick up Tonia. With their Easter hats and frocks carefully
wrapped and bundled against the dust, the fair aggregation would
then merrily jog the ten miles to Cactus, where on the morrow they
would array themselves, subjugate man, do homage to Easter, and
cause jealous agitation among the lilies of the field.
Tonia sat on the steps of the Espinosa ranch house flicking gloomily
with a quirt at a tuft of curly mesquite. She displayed a frown
and a contumelious lip, and endeavored to radiate an aura of
disagreeableness and tragedy.
"I hate railroads," she announced positively. "And men. Men pretend
to run them. Can you give any excuse why a trestle should burn? Ida
Bennet's hat is to be trimmed with violets. I shall not go one step
toward Cactus without a new hat. If I were a man I would get one."
Two men listened uneasily to this disparagement of their kind. One
was Wells Pearson, foreman of the Mucho Calor cattle ranch. The
other was Thompson Burrows, the prosperous sheepman from the Quintana
Valley. Both thought Tonia Weaver adorable, especially when she
railed at railroads and menaced men. Either would have given up his
epidermis to make for her an Easter hat more cheerfully than the
ostrich gives up his tip or the aigrette lays down its life. Neither
possessed the ingenuity to conceive a means of supplying the sad
deficiency against the coming Sabbath. Pearson's deep brown face and
sunburned light hair gave him the appearance of a schoolboy seized by
one of youth's profound and insolvable melancholies. Tonia's plight
grieved him through and through. Thompson Burrows was the more
skilled and pliable. He hailed from somewhere in the East originally;
and he wore neckties and shoes, and was made dumb by woman's presence.
"The big water-hole on Sandy Creek," said Pearson, scarcely hoping to
make a hit, "was filled up by that last rain."
"Oh! Was it?" said Tonia sharply. "Thank you for the information.
I suppose a new hat is nothing to you, Mr. Pearson. I suppose you
think a woman ought to wear an old Stetson five years without a
change, as you do. If your old water-hole could have put out the
fire on that trestle you might have some reason to talk about it."
"I am deeply sorry," said Burrows, warned by Pearson's fate, "that
you failed to receive your hat, Miss Weaver - deeply sorry, indeed.
If there was anything I could do - "
"Don't bother," interrupted Tonia, with sweet sarcasm. "If there was
anything you could do, you'd be doing it, of course. There isn't."
Tonia paused. A sudden sparkle of hope had come into her eye. Her
frown smoothed away. She had an inspiration.
"There's a store over at Lone Elm Crossing on the Nueces," she said,
"that keeps hats. Eva Rogers got hers there. She said it was the
latest style. It might have some left. But it's twenty-eight miles
to Lone Elm."
The spurs of two men who hastily arose jingled; and Tonia almost
smiled. The Knights, then, were not all turned to dust; nor were
their rowels rust.
"Of course," said Tonia, looking thoughtfully at a white gulf cloud
sailing across the cerulean dome, "nobody could ride to Lone Elm and
back by the time the girls call by for me to-morrow. So, I reckon
I'll have to stay at home this Easter Sunday."
And then she smiled.
"Well, Miss Tonia," said Pearson, reaching for his hat, as guileful
as a sleeping babe. "I reckon I'll be trotting along back to Mucho
Calor. There's some cutting out to be done on Dry Branch first thing
in the morning; and me and Road Runner has got to be on hand. It's
too bad your hat got sidetracked. Maybe they'll get that trestle
mended yet in time for Easter."
"I must be riding, too, Miss Tonia," announced Burrows, looking at
his watch. "I declare, it's nearly five o'clock! I must be out at
my lambing camp in time to help pen those crazy ewes."
Tonia's suitors seemed to have been smitten with a need for haste.
They bade her a ceremonious farewell, and then shook each other's
hands with the elaborate and solemn courtesy of the Southwesterner.
"Hope I'll see you again soon, Mr. Pearson," said Burrows.
"Same here," said the cowman, with the serious face of one whose
friend goes upon a whaling voyage. "Be gratified to see you ride
over to Mucho Calor any time you strike that section of the range."
Pearson mounted Road Runner, the soundest cow-pony on the Frio, and
let him pitch for a minute, as he always did on being mounted, even
at the end of a day's travel.
"What kind of a hat was that, Miss Tonia," he called, "that you
ordered from San Antone? I can't help but be sorry about that hat."
"A straw," said Tonia; "the latest shape, of course; trimmed with red
roses. That's what I like - red roses."
"There's no color more becoming to your complexion and hair," said
Burrows, admiringly.
"It's what I like," said Tonia. "And of all the flowers, give me red
roses. Keep all the pinks and blues for yourself. But what's the
use, when trestles burn and leave you without anything? It'll be a
dry old Easter for me!"
Pearson took off his hat and drove Road Bunner at a gallop into the
chaparral east of the Espinosa ranch house.
As his stirrups rattled against the brush Burrows's long-legged
sorrel struck out down the narrow stretch of open prairie to the
southwest.
Tonia hung up her quirt and went into the sitting-room.
"I'm mighty sorry, daughter, that you didn't get your hat," said her
mother.
"Oh, don't worry, mother," said Tonia, coolly. "I'll have a new hat,
all right, in time to-morrow."
When Burrows reached the end of the strip of prairie he pulled his
sorrel to the right and let him pick his way daintily across a
sacuista flat through which ran the ragged, dry bed of an arroyo.
Then up a gravelly hill, matted with bush, the hoarse scrambled, and
at length emerged, with a snort of satisfaction into a stretch of
high, level prairie, grassy and dotted with the lighter green of
mesquites in their fresh spring foliage. Always to the right Burrows
bore, until in a little while he struck the old Indian trail that
followed the Nueces southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles
to the southeast, through Lone Elm.
Here Burrows urged the sorrel into a steady lope. As he settled
himself in the saddle for a long ride he heard the drumming of hoofs,
the hollow "thwack" of chaparral against wooden stirrups, the whoop
of a Comanche; and Wells Pearson burst out of the brush at the right
of the trail like a precocious yellow chick from a dark green Easter
egg.
Except in the presence of awing femininity melancholy found no place
in Pearson's bosom. In Tonia's presence his voice was as soft as a
summer bullfrog's in his reedy nest. Now, at his gleesome yawp,
rabbits, a mile away, ducked their ears, and sensitive plants closed
their fearful fronds.
"Moved your lambing camp pretty far from the ranch, haven't you,
neighbor?" asked Pearson, as Road Runner fell in at the sorrel's
side.
"Twenty-eight miles," said Burrows, looking a little grim. Pearson's
laugh woke an owl one hour too early in his water-elm on the river
bank, half a mile away.
"All right for you, sheepman. I like an open game, myself. We're
two locoed he-milliners hat-hunting in the wilderness. I notify you.
Burr, to mind your corrals. We've got an even start, and the one
that gets the headgear will stand some higher at the Espinosa."
"You've got a good pony," said Burrows, eyeing Road Runner's barrel-
like body and tapering legs that moved as regularly as the pistonrod
of an engine. "It's a race, of course; but you're too much of a
horseman to whoop it up this soon. Say we travel together till we
get to the home stretch."
"I'm your company," agreed Pearson, "and I admire your sense. If
there's hats at Lone Elm, one of 'em shall set on Miss Tonia's brow
to-morrow, and you won't be at the crowning. I ain't bragging, Burr,
but that sorrel of yours is weak in the fore-legs."
"My horse against yours," offered Burrows, "that Miss Tonia wears
the hat I take her to Cactus to-morrow."
"I'll take you up," shouted Pearson. "But oh, it's just like horse-
stealing for me! I can use that sorrel for a lady's animal when -
when somebody comes over to Mucho Calor, and - "
Burrows' dark face glowered so suddenly that the cowman broke off his
sentence. But Pearson could never feel any pressure for long.
"What's all this Easter business about, Burr?" he asked, cheerfully.
"Why do the women folks have to have new hats by the almanac or bust
all cinches trying to get 'em?"
"It's a seasonable statute out of the testaments," explained Burrows.
"It's ordered by the Pope or somebody. And it has something to do
with the Zodiac I don't know exactly, but I think it was invented by
the Egyptians."
"It's an all-right jubilee if the heathens did put their brand on
it," said Pearson; "or else Tonia wouldn't have anything to do with
it. And they pull it off at church, too. Suppose there ain't but
one hat in the Lone Elm store, Burr!"
"Then," said Burrows, darkly, "the best man of us'll take it back to
the Espinosa."
"Oh, man!" cried Pearson, throwing his hat high and catching it
again, "there's nothing like you come off the sheep ranges before.
You talk good and collateral to the occasion. And if there's more
than one?"
"Then," said Burrows, "we'll pick our choice and one of us'll get
back first with his and the other won't."
"There never was two souls," proclaimed Pearson to the stars, "that
beat more like one heart than yourn and mine. Me and you might be
riding on a unicorn and thinking out of the same piece of mind."
At a little past midnight the riders loped into Lone Elm. The half a
hundred houses of the big village were dark. On its only street the
big wooden store stood barred and shuttered.
In a few moments the horses were fastened and Pearson was pounding
cheerfully on the door of old Sutton, the storekeeper.
The barrel of a Winchester came through a cranny of a solid window
shutter followed by a short inquiry.
"Wells Pearson, of the Mucho Calor, and Burrows, of Green Valley,"
was the response. "We want to buy some goods in the store. Sorry
to wake you up but we must have 'em. Come on out, Vncle Tommy, and
get a move on you."
Uncle Tommy was slow, but at length they got him behind his counter
with a kerosene lamp lit, and told him of their dire need.
"Easter hats?" said Uncle Tommy, sleepily. "Why, yes, I believe I
have got just a couple left. I only ordered a dozen this spring.
I'll show 'em to you."
Now, Uncle Tommy Sutton was a merchant, half asleep or awake. In
dusty pasteboard boxes under the counter he had two left-over spring
hats. But, alas! for his commercial probity on that early Saturday
morn - they were hats of two springs ago, and a woman's eye would
have detected the fraud at half a glance. But to the unintelligent
gaze of the cowpuncher and the sheepman they seemed fresh from the
mint of contemporaneous April.
The hats were of a variety once known as "cart-wheels." They were
of stiff straw, colored red, and flat brimmed. Both were exactly
alike, and trimmed lavishly around their crowns with full blown,
immaculate, artificial white roses.
"That all you got, Uncle Tommy?" said Pearson. "All right. Not much
choice here, Burr. Take your pick."
"They're the latest styles" lied Uncle Tommy. "You'd see 'em on
Fifth Avenue, if you was in New York."
Uncle Tommy wrapped and tied each hat in two yards of dark calico for
a protection. One Pearson tied carefully to his calfskin saddle-
thongs; and the other became part of Road Runner's burden. They
shouted thanks and farewells to Uncle Tommy, and cantered back into
the night on the home stretch.
The horsemen jockeyed with all their skill. They rode more slowly
on their way back. The few words they spoke were not unfriendly.
Burrows had a Winchester under his left leg slung over his saddle
horn. Pearson had a six shooter belted around him. Thus men rode
in the Frio country.
At half-past seven in the morning they rode to the top of a hill and
saw the Espinosa Ranch, a white spot under a dark patch of live-oaks,
five miles away.
The sight roused Pearson from his drooping pose in the saddle.
He knew what Road Runner could do. The sorrel was lathered, and
stumbling frequently; Road Runner was pegging away like a donkey
engine.
Pearson turned toward the sheepman and laughed. "Good-bye, Burr," he
cried, with a wave of his hand. "It's a race now. We're on the home
stretch."
He pressed Road Runner with his knees and leaned toward the Espinosa.
Road Runner struck into a gallop, with tossing head and snorting
nostrils, as if he were fresh from a month in pasture.
Pearson rode twenty yards and heard the unmistakable sound of a
Winchester lever throwing a cartridge into the barrel. He dropped
flat along his horse's back before the crack of the rifle reached
his ears.
It is possible that Burrows intended only to disable the horse -
he was a good enough shot to do that without endangering his rider.
But as Pearson stooped the ball went through his shoulder and then
through Road Runner's neck. The horse fell and the cowman pitched
over his head into the hard road, and neither of them tried to move.
Burrows rode on without stopping.
In two hours Pearson opened his eyes and took inventory. He managed
to get to his feet and staggered back to where Road Runner was
lying.
Road Runner was lying there, but he appeared to be comfortable.
Pearson examined him and found that the bullet had "creased" him.
He had been knocked out temporarily, but not seriously hurt. But he
was tired, and he lay there on Miss Tonia's hat and ate leaves from
a mesquite branch that obligingly hung over the road.
Pearson made the horse get up. The Easter hat, loosed from the
saddle-thongs, lay there in its calico wrappings, a shapeless thing
from its sojourn beneath the solid carcass of Road Runner. Then
Pearson fainted and fell head long upon the poor hat again, crumpling
it under his wounded shoulders.
It is hard to kill a cowpuncher. In half an hour he revived - long
enough for a woman to have fainted twice and tried ice-cream for a
restorer. He got up carefully and found Road Runner who was busy
with the near-by grass. He tied the unfortunate hat to the saddle
again, and managed to get himself there, too, after many failures.
At noon a gay and fluttering company waited in front of the Espinosa
Ranch. The Rogers girls were there in their new buckboard, and the
Anchor-O outfit and the Green Valley folks - mostly women. And each
and every one wore her new Easter hat, even upon the lonely prairies,
for they greatly desired to shine forth and do honor to the coming
festival.
At the gate stood Tonia. with undisguised tears upon her cheeks.
In her hand she held Burrow's Lone Elm hat, and it was at its white
roses, hated by her, that she wept. For her friends were telling
her, with the ecstatic joy of true friends, that cart-wheels could
not be worn, being three seasons passed into oblivion.
"Put on your old hat and come, Tonia," they urged.
"For Easter Sunday?" she answered. "I'll die first." And wept
again.
The hats of the fortunate ones were curved and twisted into the style
of spring's latest proclamation.
A strange being rode out of the brush among them, and there sat his
horse languidly. He was stained and disfigured with the green of the
grass and the limestone of rocky roads.
"Hallo, Pearson," said Daddy Weaver. "Look like you've been breaking
a mustang. What's that you've got tied to your saddle - a pig in a
poke?"
"Oh, come on, Tonia, if you're going," said Betty Rogers. "We mustn't
wait any longer. We've saved a seat in the buckboard for you. Never
mind the hat. That lovely muslin you've got on looks sweet enough
with any old hat."
Pearson was slowly untying the queer thing on his saddle. Tonia
looked at him with a sudden hope. Pearson was a man who created
hope. He got the thing loose and handed it to her. Her quick
fingers tore at the strings.
"Best I could do," said Pearson slowly. "What Road Runner and me
done to it will be about all it needs."
"Oh, oh! it's just the right shape," shrieked Tonia. "And red roses!
Wait till I try it on!"
She flew in to the glass, and out again, beaming, radiating,
blossomed.
"Oh, don't red become her?" chanted the girls in recitative. "Hurry
up, Tonia!"
Tonia stopped for a moment by the side of Road Runner.
"Thank you, thank you, Wells," she said, happily. "It's just what
I wanted. Won't you come over to Cactus to-morrow and go to church
with me?"
"If I can," said Pearson. He was looking curiously at her hat, and
then he grinned weakly.
Tonia flew into the buckboard like a bird. The vehicles sped away
for Cactus.
"What have you been doing, Pearson?" asked Daddy Weaver. "You ain't
looking so well as common."
"Me?" said Pearson. "I've been painting flowers. Them roses was
white when I left Lone Elm. Help me down, Daddy Weaver, for I
haven't got any more paint to spare."
ROUND THE CIRCLE
[This story is especially interesting as an early treatment (1902)
of the theme afterward developed with a surer hand in The Pendulum.]
"Find yo' shirt all right, Sam?" asked Mrs. Webber, from her chair
under the live-oak, where she was comfortably seated with a paper-
back volume for company.
"It balances perfeckly, Marthy," answered Sam, with a suspicious
pleasantness in his tone. "At first I was about ter be a little
reckless and kick 'cause ther buttons was all off, but since I
diskiver that the button holes is all busted out, why, I wouldn't
go so fur as to say the buttons is any loss to speak of."
"Oh, well," said his wife, carelessly, "put on your necktie - that'll
keep it together."
Sam Webber's sheep ranch was situated in the loneliest part of the
country between the Nueces and the Frio. The ranch house - a two-room
box structure - was on the rise of a gently swelling hill in the midst
of a wilderness of high chaparral. In front of it was a small
clearing where stood the sheep pens, shearing shed, and wool house.
Only a few feet back of it began the thorny jungle.
Sam was going to ride over to the Chapman ranch to see about buying
some more improved merino rams. At length he came out, ready for his
ride. This being a business trip of some importance, and the Chapman
ranch being almost a small town in population and size, Sam had
decided to "dress up" accordingly. The result was that he had
transformed himself from a graceful, picturesque frontiersman into
something much less pleasing to the sight. The tight white collar
awkwardly constricted his muscular, mahogany-colored neck. The
buttonless shirt bulged in stiff waves beneath his unbuttoned vest.
The suit of "ready-made" effectually concealed the fine lines of
his straight, athletic figure. His berry-brown face was set to the
melancholy dignity befitting a prisoner of state. He gave Randy,
his three-year-old son, a pat on the head, and hurried out to where
Mexico, his favorite saddle horse, was standing.
Marthy, leisurely rocking in her chair, fixed her place in the book
with her finger, and turned her head, smiling mischievously as she
noted the havoc Sam had wrought with his appearance in trying to
"fix up."
~Well, ef I must say it, Sam," she drawled, "you look jest like one
of them hayseeds in the picture papers, 'stead of a free and
independent sheepman of the State o' Texas."
Sam climbed awkwardly into the saddle.
"You're the one ought to be 'shamed to say so," he replied hotly.
"'Stead of 'tendin' to a man's clothes you're al'ays setting around
a-readin' them billy-by-dam yaller-back novils."
"Oh, shet up and ride along," said Mrs. Webber, with a little jerk at
the handles of her chair; "you always fussin' 'bout my readin'. I do
a-plenty; and I'll read when I wanter. I live in the bresh here like
a varmint, never seein' nor hearin' nothin', and what other 'musement
kin I have? Not in listenin' to you talk, for it's complain,
complain, one day after another. Oh, go on, Sam, and leave me in
peace."
Sam gave his pony a squeeze with his knees and "shoved" down the
wagon trail that connected his ranch with the old, open Government
road. It was eight o'clock, and already beginning to be very warm.
He should have started three hours earlier. Chapman ranch was only
eighteen miles away, but there was a road for only three miles of the
distance. He had ridden over there once with one of the Half-Moon
cowpunchers, and he had the direction well-defined in his mind.
Sam turned off the old Government road at the split mesquite, and
struck down the arroyo of the Quintanilla. Here was a narrow stretch
of smiling valley, upholstered with a rich mat of green, curly
mesquite grass; and Mexico consumed those few miles quickly with his
long, easy lope. Again, upon reaching Wild Duck Waterhole, must he
abandon well-defined ways. He turned now to his right up a little
hill, pebble-covered, upon which grew only the tenacious and thorny
prickly pear and chaparral. At the summit of this he paused to take
his last general view of the landscape for, from now on, he must wind
through brakes and thickets of chaparral, pear, and mesquite, for the
most part seeing scarcely farther than twenty yards in any direction,
choosing his way by the prairie-dweller's instinct, guided only by an
occasional glimpse of a far distant hilltop, a peculiarly shaped knot
of trees, or the position of the sun.
Sam rode down the sloping hill and plunged into the great pear flat
that lies between the Quintanilla and the Piedra.
In about two hours he discovered that he was lost. Then came the
usual confusion of mind and the hurry to get somewhere. Mexico was
anxious to redeem the situation, twisting with alacrity along the
tortuous labyrinths of the jungle. At the moment his master's
sureness of the route had failed his horse had divined the fact.
There were no hills now that they could climb to obtain a view of
the country. They came upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was
the brush that scarcely could a rabbit penetrate the mass. They
were in the great, lonely thicket of the Frio bottoms.
It was a mere nothing for a cattleman or a sheepman to be lost for a
day or a night. The thing often happened. It was merely a matter
of missing a meal or two and sleeping comfortably on your saddle
blankets on a soft mattress of mesquite grass. But in Sam's case
it was different. He had never been away from his ranch at night.
Marthy was afraid of the country - afraid of Mexicans, of snakes, of
panthers, even of sheep. So he had never left her alone.
It must have been about four in the afternoon when Sam's conscience
awoke. He was limp and drenched, rather from anxiety than the heat
or fatigue. Until now he had been hoping to strike the trail that
led to the Frio crossing and the Chapman ranch. He must have
crossed it at some dim part of it and ridden beyond. If so he was
now something like fifty miles from home. If he could strike a
ranch - a camp - any place where he could get a fresh horse and
inquire the road, he would ride all night to get back to Marthy and
the kid.
So, I have hinted, Sam was seized bv remorse. There was a big lump
in his throat as he thought of the cross words he had spoken to his
wife. Surely it was hard enough for her to live in that horrible
country witnout having to bear the burden of his abuse. He cursed
himself grimly, and felt a sudden flush of shame that over-glowed the
summer heat as he remembered the many times he had flouted and railed
at her because she had a liking for reading fiction.
"Ther only so'ce ov amusement ther po' gal's got," said Sam aloud,
with a sob, which unaccustomed sound caused Mexico to shy a bit.
A-livin with a sore-headed kiote like me - a low-down skunk that ought
to be licked to death with a saddle cinch - a-cookin' and a-washin'
and a-livin' on mutton and beans and me abusin' her fur takin' a
squint or two in a little book!"
He thought of Marthy as she had been when he first met her in
Dogtown - smart, pretty, and saucy - before the sun had turned the
roses in her cheeks brown and the silence of the chaparral had
tamed her ambitions.
"Ef I ever speaks another hard word to ther little gal," muttered
Sam, "or fails in the love and affection that's coming to her in
the deal, I hopes a wildcat'll t'ar me to pieces."
He knew what he would do. He would write to Garcia & Jones, his San
Antonio merchants where he bought his supplies and sold his wool, and
have them send down a big box of novels and reading matter for Marthy.
Things were going to be different. He wondered whether a little
piano could be placed in one of the rooms of the ranch house without
the family having to move out of doors.
In nowise calculated to allay his self-reproach was the thought that
Marthy and Randy would have to pass the night alone. In spite of
their bickerings, when night came Marthy was wont to dismiss her fears
of the country, and rest her head upon Sam's strong arm with a sigh
of peaceful content and dependence. And were her fears so groundless?
Sam thought of roving, marauding Mexicans, of stealthy cougars that
sometimes invaded the ranches, of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a
dozen possible dangers. Marthy would be frantic with fear. Randy
would cry, and call for dada to come.
Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and
mesquite. Hollow after hollow, slope after slope - all exactly alike
- all familiar by constant repetition, and yet all strange and new.
If he could only arrive ~somewhere.~
The straight line is Art. Nature moves in circles. A
straightforward man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist
is. Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink,
exhausted, as their footprints have attested. Also, travellers in
philosophy and other mental processes frequently wind up at their
starting-point.
It was when Sam Webber was fullest of contrition and good resolves
that Mexico, with a heavy sigh, subsided from his regular, brisk trot
into a slow complacent walk. They were winding up an easy slope
covered with brush ten or twelve feet high.
"I say now, Mex," demurred Sam, "this here won't do. I know you're
plumb tired out, but we got ter git along. Oh, Lordy, ain't there
no mo' houses in the world!" He gave Mexico a smart kick with his
heels.
Mexico gave a protesting grunt as if to say: "What's the use of
that, now we're so near?" He quickened his gait into a languid trot.
Rounding a great clump of black chaparral he stopped short. Sam
dropped the bridle reins and sat, looking into the back door of his
own house, not ten yards away.
Marthy, serene and comfortable, sat in her rocking-chair before the
door in the shade of the house, with her feet resting luxuriously
upon the steps. Randy, who was playing with a pair of spurs on the
ground, looked up for a moment at his father and went on spinning the
rowels and singing a little song. Marthy turned her head lazily
against the back of the chair and considered the arrivals with
emotionless eyes. She held a book in her lap with her finger holding
the place.
Sam shook himself queerly, like a man coming out of a dream, and
slowly dismounted. He moistened his dry lips.
"I see you are still a-settin'," he said, "a-readin' of them billy-
by-dam yaller-back novils."
Sam had traveled round the circle and was himself again.
THE RUBBER PLANT'S STORY
We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable
kingdom and the decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third
Avenue theatre. I haven't looked up our family tree, but I believe
we were raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table
d'hote stalk of asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke
Cockran air of independence about him and a rubber plant and there
you have the fauna and flora of a flat. What the shamrock is to
Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished
rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the
only way we can get our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are
the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree. You know the proverb:
"Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up
to the door."
We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No
other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much
handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into
a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and
penates, fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of "Home Sweet Home."
We aren't as green as we look. I guess we are about what you would
call the soubrettes of the conservatory. You try sitting in the
front window of a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the
street all day, and back into the flat at night, and see whether you
get wise or not - hey? Talk about the tree of knowledge of good and
evil in the garden of Eden - say! suppose there had been a rubber
plant there when Eve - but I was going to tell you a story.
The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged
to a member of the pony ballet. I was kept in a sunny window, and
was generally watered with seltzer and lemon. I had plenty of fun
in those days. I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the
automobiles in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the
same time.
Well, then the angel that was molting for the musical comedy lost his
last feather and the company broke up. The ponies trotted away and I
was left in the window ownerless. The janitor gave me to a refined
comedy team on the eighth floor, and in six weeks I had been set in
the window of five different flats I took on experience and put out
two more leaves.
Miss Carruthers, of the refined comedy team - did you ever see her
cross both feet back of her neck? - gave me to a friend of hers who
had made an unfortunate marriage with a man in a store. Consequently
I was placed in the window of a furnished room, rent in advance,
water two flights up, gas extra after ten o'clock at night. Two of
my leaves withered off here. Also, I was moved from one room to
another so many times that I got to liking the odor of the pipes the
expressmen smoked.
I don't think I ever had so dull a time as I did with this lady.
There was never anything amusing going on inside - she was devoted
to her husband, and, besides leaning out the window and flirting with
the iceman, she never did a thing toward breaking the monotony.
When the couple broke up they left me with the rest of their goods at
a second-hand store. I was put out in front for sale along with the
jobbiest lot you ever heard of being lumped into one bargain. Think
of this little cornucopia of wonders, all for $1.89: Henry James's
works, six talking machine records, one pair of tennis shoes, two
bottles of horse radish, and a rubber plant - that was me!
One afternoon a girl came along and stopped to look at me. She had
dark hair and eyes, and she looked slim, and sad around the mouth.
"Oh, oh!" she says to herself. "I never thought to see one up here."
She pulls out a little purse about as thick as one of my leaves and
fingers over some small silver in it. Old Koen, always on the
lockout, is ready, rubbing his hands. This girl proceeds to turn
down Mr. James and the other commodities. Rubber plants or nothing
is the burden of her song. And at last Koen and she come together at
39 cents, and away she goes with me in her arms.
She was a nice girl, but not my style. Too quiet and sober looking.
Thinks I to myself: "I'll just about land on the fire-escape of a
tenement, six stories up. And I'll spend the next six months looking
at clothes on the line."
But she carried me to a nice little room only three flights up in
quite a decent street. And she put me in the window, of course. And
then she went to work and cooked dinner for herself. And what do you
suppose she had? Bread and tea and a little dab of jam! Nothing
else. Not a single lobster, nor so much as one bottle of champagne.
The Carruthers comedy team had both every evening, except now and
then when they took a notion for pig's knuckle and kraut.
After she had finished her dinner my new owner came to the window
and leaned down close to my leaves and cried softly to herself for a
while. It made me feel funny. I never knew anybody to cry that way
over a rubber plant before. Of course, I've seen a few of 'em turn
on the tears for what they could get out of it, but she seemed to be
crying just for the pure enjoyment of it. She touched my leaves like
she loved 'em, and she bent down her head and kissed each one of 'em.
I guess I'm about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid on
earth, but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer. Home never was
like that to me before. Generally I used to get chewed by poodles
and have shirt-waists hung on me to dry, and get watered with coffee
grounds and peroxide of hydrogen.
This girl had a piano in the room, and she used to disturb it with
both hands while she made noises with her mouth for hours at a time.
I suppose she was practising vocal music.
One day she seemed very much excited and kept looking at the clock.
At eleven somebody knocked and she let in a stout, dark man with
towsled black hair. He sat down at once at the piano and played
while she sang for him. When she finished she laid one hand on her
bosom and looked at him. He shook his head, and she leaned against
the piano. "Two years already," she said, speaking slowly - "do you
think in two more - or even longer?"
The man shook his head again. "You waste your time," he said,
roughly I thought. "The voice is not there." And then he looked at
her in a peculiar way. "But the voice is not everything," he went
on. "You have looks. I can place you, as I told you if - "
The girl pointed to the door without saying anything, and the dark
man left the room. And then she came over and cried around me again.
It's a good thing I had enough rubber in me to be water-proof.
About that time somebody else knocked at the door. "Thank goodness,"
I said to myself. "Here's a chance to get the water-works turned
off. I hope it's somebody that's game enough to stand a bird and a
bottle to liven things up a little." Tell you the truth, this little
girl made me tired. A rubber plant likes to see a little sport now
and then. I don't suppose there's another green thing in New York
that sees as much of gay life unless it's the chartreuse or the
sprigs of parsley around the dish.
When the girl opens the door in steps a young chap in a traveling cap
and picks her up in his arms, and she sings out "Oh, Dick!" and stays
there long enough to - well, you've been a rubber plant too,
sometimes, I suppose.
"Good thing!" says I to myself. "This is livelier than scales and
weeping. Now there'll be something doing."
"You've got to go back with me," says the young man. "I've come two
thousand miles for you. Aren't you tired of it yet. Bess? You've
kept all of us waiting so long. Haven't you found out yet what is
best?"
"The bubble burst only to-day," says the girl. "Come here, Dick, and
see what I found the other day on the sidewalk for sale." She brings
him by the hand and exhibits yours truly. "How one ever got away up
here who can tell? I bought it with almost the last money I had."
He looked at me, but he couldn't keep his eyes off her for more than
a second. "Do you remember the night, Bess," he said, "when we stood
under one of those on the bank of the bayou and what you told me
then?"
"Geewillikins!" I said to myself. "Both of them stand under a rubber
plant! Seems to me they are stretching matters somewhat!"
"Do I not," says she, looking up at him and sneaking close to his
vest, "and now I say it again, and it is to last forever. Look,
Dick, at its leaves, how wet they are. Those are my tears, and it
was thinking of you that made them fall."
"The dear old magnolias!" says the young man, pinching one of my
leaves. "I love them all."
Magnolia! Well, wouldn't that - say! those innocents thought I was a
magnolia! What the - well, wasn't that tough on a genuine little old
New York rubber plant?
OUT OF NAZARETH
Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of
it with a "wad." Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar
debt, a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city
council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of
the town. These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the
river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern
tourist. Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider
itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak. And then that
harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South - the man
who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a
dollar's worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar - that man
added his deadly work to the tourist's innocent praise, and Okochee
fell.
The Cooloosa River winds through a range of small mountains, passes
Okochee and then blends its waters trippingly, as fall the mellifluous
Indian syllables, with the Chattahoochee.
Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post-office