""Well, then?" says I, for I wasn"t thinking as he was.
""And he bagged one," says John Tom, "and "twas not with a gun, and he never had on a velveteen suit of clothes in his life." And then I began to catch his smoke.
""I know it," says I. "And I"ll bet you his pictures are on valentines, and fool men are his game, red and white."
""You win on the red," says John Tom, calm. "Jeff, for how many ponies do you think I could buy Mrs. Conyers?"
""Scandalous talk!" I replies. ""Tis not a paleface custom." John Tom laughs loud and bites into a cigar. "No," he answers; ""tis the savage equivalent for the dollars of the white man"s marriage settlement. Oh, I know. There"s an eternal wall between the races. If I could do it, Jeff, I"d put a torch to every white college that a redman has ever set foot inside. Why don"t you leave us alone," he says, "to our own ghost-dances and dog-feasts, and our dingy squaws to cook our gra.s.shopper soup and darn our moccasins?"
""Now, you sure don"t mean disrespect to the perennial blossom ent.i.tled education?" says I, scandalized, "because I wear it in the bosom of my own intellectual shirt-waist. I"ve had education," says I, "and never took any harm from it."
""You la.s.so us," goes on Little Bear, not noticing my prose insertions, "and teach us what is beautiful in literature and in life, and how to appreciate what is fine in men and women. What have you done to me?"
says he. "You"ve made me a Cherokee Moses. You"ve taught me to hate the wigwams and love the white man"s ways. I can look over into the promised land and see Mrs. Conyers, but my place is--on the reservation."
"Little Bear stands up in his chief"s dress, and laughs again. "But, white man Jeff," he goes on, "the paleface provides a recourse. "Tis a temporary one, but it gives a respite and the name of it is whiskey."
And straight off he walks up the path to town again. "Now," says I in my mind, "may the Manitou move him to do only bailable things this night!"
For I perceive that John Tom is about to avail himself of the white man"s solace.
"Maybe it was 10:30, as I sat smoking, when I hear pit-a-pats on the path, and here comes Mrs. Conyers running, her hair twisted up any way, and a look on her face that says burglars and mice and the flour"s-all-out rolled in one. "Oh, Mr. Peters," she calls out, as they will, "oh, oh!" I made a quick think, and I spoke the gist of it out loud. "Now," says I, "we"ve been brothers, me and that Indian, but I"ll make a good one of him in two minutes if--"
""No, no," she says, wild and cracking her knuckles, "I haven"t seen Mr.
Little Bear. "Tis my--husband. He"s stolen my boy. Oh," she says, "just when I had him back in my arms again! That heartless villain! Every bitterness life knows," she says, "he"s made me drink. My poor little lamb, that ought to be warm in his bed, carried of by that fiend!"
""How did all this happen?" I ask. "Let"s have the facts."
""I was fixing his bed," she explains, "and Roy was playing on the hotel porch and he drives up to the steps. I heard Roy scream, and ran out. My husband had him in the buggy then. I begged him for my child. This is what he gave me." She turns her face to the light. There is a crimson streak running across her cheek and mouth. "He did that with his whip,"
she says.
""Come back to the hotel," says I, "and we"ll see what can be done."
"On the way she tells me some of the wherefores. When he slashed her with the whip he told her he found out she was coming for the kid, and he was on the same train. Mrs. Conyers had been living with her brother, and they"d watched the boy always, as her husband had tried to steal him before. I judge that man was worse than a street railway promoter. It seems he had spent her money and slugged her and killed her canary bird, and told it around that she had cold feet.
"At the hotel we found a ma.s.s meeting of five infuriated citizens chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage. Most of the town was asleep by ten o"clock. I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I will take the one o"clock train for the next town, forty miles east, for it is likely that the esteemed Mr. Conyers will drive there to take the cars.
"I don"t know," I tells her, "but what he has legal rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace proposition."
"Mrs. Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord"s wife, who is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the poor dear. The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one suspender, and says to me:
""Ain"t had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall"s wife swallered a spring lizard. I seen him through the winder hit her with the buggy whip, and everything. What"s that suit of clothes cost you you got on? "Pears like we"d have some rain, don"t it? Say, doc, that Indian of yorn"s on a kind of a whizz to-night, ain"t he? He comes along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. He gives a cur"us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our constable "ll have him in the lock-up "fore morning."
"I thought I"d sit on the porch and wait for the one o"clock train. I wasn"t feeling saturated with mirth. Here was John Tom on one of his sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me. But then, I"m always having trouble with other people"s troubles. Every few minutes Mrs. Conyers would come out on the porch and look down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand. Now, wasn"t that like a woman? And that brings up cats. "I saw a mouse go in this hole," says Mrs. Cat; "you can go prize up a plank over there if you like; I"ll watch this hole."
"About a quarter to one o"clock the lady comes out again, restless, crying easy, as females do for their own amus.e.m.e.nt, and she looks down that road again and listens. "Now, ma"am," says I, "there"s no use watching cold wheel-tracks. By this time they"re halfway to--"
"Hush," she says, holding up her hand. And I do hear something coming "flip-flap" in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinee. And up the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian. The lamp in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize Mr. J. T. Little Bear, alumnus of the cla.s.s of "91. What I see is a Cherokee brave, and the warpath is what he has been travelling. Firewater and other things have got him going. His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers are mixed up like a frizzly hen"s. The dust of miles is on his moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear. But in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian"s collar.
""Pappoose!" says John Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white man"s syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in bear"s claws and copper color. "Me bring," says he, and he lays the kid in his mother"s arms. "Run fifteen mile," says John Tom--"Ugh! Catch white man. Bring pappoose."
"The little woman is in extremities of gladness. She must wake up that stir-up trouble youngster and hug him and make proclamation that he is his mamma"s own precious treasure. I was about to ask questions, but I looked at Mr. Little Bear, and my eye caught the sight of something in his belt. "Now go to bed, ma"am," says I, "and this gadabout youngster likewise, for there"s no more danger, and the kidnapping business is not what it was earlier in the night."
"I inveigled John Tom down to camp quick, and when he tumbled over asleep I got that thing out of his belt and disposed of it where the eye of education can"t see it. For even the football colleges disapprove of the art of scalp-taking in their curriculums.
"It is ten o"clock next day when John Tom wakes up and looks around. I am glad to see the nineteenth century in his eyes again.
""What was it, Jeff?" he asks.
""Heap firewater," says I.
"John Tom frowns, and thinks a little. "Combined," says he directly, "with the interesting little physiological shake-up known as reversion to type. I remember now. Have they gone yet?"
""On the 7:30 train," I answers.
""Ugh!" says John Tom; "better so. Paleface, bring big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough a little bromo-seltzer, and then he"ll take up the redman"s burden again.""
[Ill.u.s.tration: Emigrants" Camp (An early drawing by O. Henry)]
HELPING THE OTHER FELLOW
[Originally published in _Munsey"s Magazine_, December, 1908.]
"But can thim that helps others help thimselves!"
--Mulvaney.
This is the story that William Trotter told me on the beach at Aguas Frescas while I waited for the gig of the captain of the fruit steamer _Andador_ which was to take me abroad. Reluctantly I was leaving the Land of Always Afternoon. William was remaining, and he favored me with a condensed oral autobiography as we sat on the sands in the shade cast by the Bodega Nacional.
As usual, I became aware that the Man from Bombay had already written the story; but as he had compressed it to an eight-word sentence, I have become an expansionist, and have quoted his phrase above, with apologies to him and best regards to _Terence_.
II
"Don"t you ever have a desire to go back to the land of derby hats and starched collars?" I asked him. "You seem to be a handy man and a man of action," I continued, "and I am sure I could find you a comfortable job somewhere in the States."
Ragged, shiftless, barefooted, a confirmed eater of the lotos, William Trotter had pleased me much, and I hated to see him gobbled up by the tropics.
"I"ve no doubt you could," he said, idly splitting the bark from a section of sugar-cane. "I"ve no doubt you could do much for me. If every man could do as much for himself as he can for others, every country in the world would be holding millenniums instead of centennials."
There seemed to be pabulum in W. T."s words. And then another idea came to me.
I had a brother in Chicopee Falls who owned manufactories--cotton, or sugar, or A. A. sheetings, or something in the commercial line. He was vulgarly rich, and therefore reverenced art. The artistic temperament of the family was monopolized at my birth. I knew that Brother James would honor my slightest wish. I would demand from him a position in cotton, sugar, or sheetings for William Trotter--something, say, at two hundred a month or thereabouts. I confided my beliefs and made my large propositions to William. He had pleased me much, and he was ragged.
While we were talking, there was a sound of firing guns--four or five, rattlingly, as if by a squad. The cheerful noise came from the direction of the cuartel, which is a kind of makeshift barracks for the soldiers of the republic.
"Hear that?" said William Trotter. "Let me tell you about it.