О. Генри - Short Stories / Рассказы

“ ‘But,’ I goes on, ‘this is not exactly the case of a friend. Twelve dollars a month is only bowing-acquaintance money. And I do not consider brown beans and corn-bread the food of friendship. I am a poor man,’ says I, ‘and I have a widowed mother in Texarkana. You will find Black Bill,’ says I, ‘lying asleep in this house on a cot in the room to your right. He’s the man you want, as I know from his words and conversation. He was in a way a friend,’ I explains, ‘and if I was the man I once was the entire product of the mines of Gondola would not have tempted me to betray him. But,’ says I, ‘every week half of the beans was wormy, and not nigh enough wood in camp.

“ ‘Better go in careful, gentlemen,’ says I. ‘He seems impatient at times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits one would look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden.’

“So the whole posse unmounts and ties their horses, and unlimbers their ammunition and equipments, and tiptoes into the house. And I follows, like Delilah when she set the Philip Stein on to Samson.

“The leader of the posse shakes Ogden and wakes him up. And then he jumps up, and two more of the reward-hunters grab him. Ogden was mighty tough with all his slimness, and he gives’em as neat a single-footed tussle against odds as I ever see.

“ ‘What does this mean?’ he says, after they had him down.

“ ‘You’re scooped in, Mr Black Bill,’ says the captain. ‘That’s all.’

“ ‘It’s an outrage,’ says H. Ogden, madder yet.

“ ‘It was,’ says the peace-and-good-will man. ‘The Katy wasn’t bothering you, and there’s a law against monkeying with express packages.’

“And he sits on H. Ogden’s stomach and goes through his pockets symptomatically and careful.

“ ‘I’ll make you perspire for this,’ says Ogden, perspiring some himself. ‘I can prove who I am.’

“ ‘So can I,’ says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden’s inside coat-pocket a handful of new bills of the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. ‘Your regular engraved Tuesdays-and-Fridays visiting-card wouldn’t have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity than this here currency. You can get up now and prepare to go with us and expatriate your sins.

“H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie. He says no more after they have taken the money off of him.

“ ‘A well-greased idea,’ says the sheriff captain, admiring, ‘to slip off down here and buy a little sheep-ranch where the hand of man is seldom heard. It was the slickest hide-out I ever see,’ says the captain.

“So one of the men goes to the shearing-pen and hunts up the other herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles Ogden’s horse, and the sheriffs all ride tip close around him with their guns in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town.

“Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sallies’ hands and gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, just as if he intended to be back in a few days. And a couple of hours afterward one Percival Saint Clair, an ex-sheep-herder of the Rancho Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars – wages and blood-money – in his pocket, riding south on another horse belonging to said ranch.’

The red-faced man paused and listened. The whistle of a coming freight-train sounded far away among the low hills.

The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed, and shook his frowzy head slowly and disparagingly.

“What is it, Snipy?’ asked the other. ‘Got the blues again?’

“No, I ain’t,’ said the seedy one, sniffing again. ‘But I don’t like your talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen years; and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the law – not no one. And here was a man whose saleratus you had eat and at whose table you had played games of cards – if casino can be so called. And yet you inform him to the law and take money for it. It never was like you, I say.’

“This H. Ogden,’ resumed the red-faced man, ‘through a lawyer, proved himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities, as I so heard afterward. He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I hated to hand him over.’

“How about the bills they found in his pocket?’ asked the seedy man.

“I put ’em there,’ said the red-faced man, ‘while he was asleep, when I saw the posse riding up. I was Black Bill. Look out, Snipy, here she comes! We’ll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the tank.’

I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As “Harper’s Drawer” used to say in bygone years: “The following good story is told of Miss —, Mr —, Mr – and Mr —.”

We shall have to omit “Bishop X” and “the Rev. – ,” for they do not belong.

In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific. A reporter would have called it a “mushroom” town; but it was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.

The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, “black-waxy” mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-day train by which you might leave, creditably sustained the role of charity.

The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and sorghum.

There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which the family lived. From the kitchen extended a “shelter” made of poles covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches, each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.

Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as “Betty,” but denied to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.

Ileen Hinkle!

The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have indorsed the phonography.

Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-stand – or was it a temple? – under the shelter at the door of the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the barbed wire; for every man who dined parisianly there would have died in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you put it under the arch, and she took it.

I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty – roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness – the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.