The Sonora Springs Tales: A Collection of Ellis Worth Short Stories

By Dean O. Smith (Editor)

Ellis Worth wrote this selection of stories between 1955 and 1972. Accordingly, they refer to people, events, and objects in the vernacular of that era: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev, costly operator-assisted long-distance telephone calls, Hudson automobiles, and so forth. In that regard, they provide a s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Annandale Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736453414

Book preview

The

Sonora Springs

Tales

A Collection of

Ellis Worth

Short Stories

Edited by

Dean O. Smith

Annandale Press

Published by Annandale Press

Spokane, WA 99224

Copyright © 2021 Dean O. Smith

All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7364534-0-7

Printed in the United States of America

For inquiries, contact Annandale Press at

[e-mail]

This book is dedicated to Everett E. Smith (1911-1972).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

The Sonora Springs Tales

An Affair of Art

An Afternoon Off

Araby

The Black Prince

The Boss and the Girl

That Bubble, Trouble

The Bull of the Mountain

By the Numbers

The Cattleman’s Etiquette

Chio

Cold Day

Da Orla

The Denunciation

Forenoon of a Farmer

A Forest Idyll

Hamelin, Revisited

The Heckler

It’s Not So Bad

Kilgard and Gerow

Lady or Tigress

Landing Party

The Last Frontier

Lawn Party

Legend of Flim-Flam Inn

The Lion That Squeaks

Live, Love, and Learn

The Long Engagement

The Lost Sweetheart

Love Is a Triangle

Mr. Merriwell’s Ordeal

Murder for Money

The Necklace

The New Man

A Night on Knob Mountain

The Order of the Garter

A Page of History

Passion in the Desert

The Quill Pen

Rip of the Mountain West

The Salesman

School in the Sky

Sex as War and Peace

You Don’t Say

The Boss and the Girl

Travel Is Broadening

Shave and a Haircut

Short and Sweet

A Simple Case

The Sinner

Soup ‘n’ Sandwich

The Suicide Club

Summer Capital

Vacations a la Mode

The Witch of Gridley

The Witness Wins

Acknowledgments

I

should like to thank Curtis F. Smith for his role in the preservation of these stories and Karlene A. Hoo for her invaluable encouragement and support during the preparation of this anthology.

Some of the stories were published previously in small literary magazines. I thank the present-day editors of Snowy Egret, the only one of them still in business, for permission to publish these stories: Ellis Worth, The Bull of the Mountain, Snowy Egret 27, no. 22-24 (1963); Cold Day, Snowy Egret 29, no. 1 (1965); and A Night on Knob Mountain, Snowy Egret 34, no. 2 (1971).

In memoriam, so to speak, I thank the editors of the now-defunct magazines for publishing: "The Witch of Gridley," Simbolica 26; Landing Party, Simbolica 31; The Black Prince, The Editors 2, no. 1 (1966); School in the Sky, Gong 1, no. 6 (1966); The Ordeal of Mr. Merriwell, Verb 3, no. 3 (1966); The Sinner, Canadian Lights September(1967); The Heckler, Iota 2, no. 1 (1968); Etiquette and the Cattleman, Latitudes 11, no. 1 (1968); A Simple Case, Cloven Hoof 1, no. 3 (1969); Bert and Clotilde, Erratica 1, no. 2 (1971); Da Orla, Quixote 4, no. 9 (1972); Short and Sweet, Erratica 1, no. 4 (1973). Their contributions to the literary arts are not forgotten.

Also in memoriam, I should like to acknowledge DeForrest H. Judd (1916-1992) who painted the ceramic cover art, Winter Mts. He was Elllis Worth’s brother-in-law.

Foreword

B

orn in 1911, Ellis Worth grew up on a farm in Minnesota. After receiving his law degree from the University of Minnesota, he practiced law in Minneapolis and then Washington, D.C. During World War II, he served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corp under General George Patton. Following his discharge, Worth resumed a career in the legal profession, as a lawyer in private practice and as an editor for a publisher of law books. He died at the age of 61 in Colorado Springs. At the time of his death, Worth had published over thirty-five short fiction stories plus a dozen or so professional legal articles.

After Worth’s death, his writings—magazines containing published stories and unpublished manuscripts—were placed in storage, where they remained out of sight, out of mind for nearly 45 years. I acquired the trove, along with his diary, in 2015 and curated the musty treasures.

Worth wrote this selection of stories between 1955 and 1972. Accordingly, they refer to people, events, and objects in the vernacular of that era: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev, costly operator-assisted long-distance telephone calls, Hudson automobiles, and so forth. In that regard, they provide a sometimes nostalgic glimpse of the history of those times.

During this period, Worth lived in Colorado, first Denver and then Colorado Springs. Many of the stories refer one way or another to Sonora Springs, a mythical city that presumably was his hometown in Colorado: hence the title of this anthology. They express a sense of place, his fondness of the Rocky-Mountain geography and culture.

Characteristically, most Ellis Worth stories are quite short. Indeed, they belong to the short-short-story genre. In his diary, Worth commented on their brevity. Thinking about my stories, I realized two distinguishing characteristics. From the beginning, I have known they were extraordinarily brief, compact, condensed. Am I writing sketches instead of stories? It may be so. However, I often feel that many authors of longer stories have put so little into their soup that the soup though copious is tasteless and weak. I try to give a concentrated, nourishing, meaty story. Also, most stories are rife with symbolism, inviting readers to stretch their imagination answering questions such as: What was the meaning of that? What comes next? Thus, the Worth stories often linger consciously or subconsciously beyond their brevity as readers process their meaning, often with a smile.

All of this is not to say that the stories are abstruse or heavy reading. To the contrary, many of them are satirical, light-hearted fables sometimes featuring squirrels or crows while others are amusing narratives about boss and employee, man and woman, love and sex—maybe. Altogether, these stories lend themselves to reading during a brief pause in the day or before bedtime at night.

Other books by or about Ellis Worth include another collection of short stories, Once Upon a Farm: Tales of Discovery (Annandale Press) and a memoir based on his diary, Ascent from the Maelstrom: The Dynamics of Recovery from Mental Illness (Annandale Press).

Dean O. Smith

January, 2021

The Sonora Springs Tales

An Affair of Art

T

here may be one born every minute, as Barnum said, but the new ones can’t hold a candle to those who have been around long enough to learn the ropes and gain experience. Van Hummel Holst, for example, is thoroughly convinced of that ever since his little affair of the heart last summer. Just between us, and with only the names changed here and there to save embarrassment, here’s what happened.

I’ve known Van ever since we went to Downing Elementary School together. In those days I had a positive propensity for getting into scrapes. It wasn’t that I was more mischievous than the average: I just tripped and plunged headfirst into deep water, automatically. Not Van Hummel Holst. He kept his nose clean, his shoes shined, and his hair brushed. If there was an empty tin can on the sidewalk as he came along, he didn’t kick it so it hit the old lady ahead of him in the back of the knees the way the rest of us did. He left the can right where it was and carefully navigated around it. He didn’t pick it up and carry it to the public waste-disposal container at the corner in the smirking fashion of Percy Marble, but he skirted around the thing as I’ve said.

Van’s always been like that: kept trouble at a distance. He was that way at Hilliard High, too. He was a good-looking fellow and wore his hair straight and long in the greasy pompadour style that was all the rage at that time. He was tall enough to play a bang-up brand of basketball, and all the sweet, sweatered, sixteens liked him. The popularity didn’t go to his head, though, so that he tried to have fun with all the girls the way the footballers did. He had a sense of proportion: enough was enough, and plenty would go a long ways.

If Van hadn’t told me himself about his little misadventure at the musical festival last summer, I wouldn’t have believed it; I mean not altogether. As I say, I’ve known Van for years and never heard of him going even to one of those jazz jam sessions, let alone a high-brow concert. A more level-headed lawyer there never was, but a long-hair? It wasn’t in him. That’s what I would have said. Why, Van has helped nearly every organization in town raise money: Goodwill, the United Fund, the Cancer Society, everybody. He’s that civic-minded. Just the same, the local symphony orchestra never tried to line him up on its side when it campaigned for funds. No wonder; he wouldn’t have known a trombone from a tuba.

Of course, quite a number of fellows I goofed around with in school and college turned out differently than anyone would have guessed. There’s Dick Moser, for example. He went to West Point, and in a few years he’ll retire as a Major General. But, at Montgomery Junior College, Dick used to drift by the old Gopher Hole Harbor practically every night to see if Hammond—we used to call him Ham Hoskins—would get moody enough to start pounding the piano. And Dick worshiped electric guitar players that Van never knew existed.

It’s hard to tell what will change a man. Maybe it’s not just one single thing, event, but a succession of things. Van had been happily married to Betty for twenty years, at least, when they surprised everybody by getting a divorce. Their only child, Elsa, was just married, and bingo, the Holst’s got divorced. One move leads to another. Then, Van left the law firm he was with to become executive secretary of a trade association. The chairman of the association was president of one of the law firm’s biggest clients, and I happen to know Van didn’t lose financially by the step. Still and all, the Holst name was the name around which all the others in that get-up revolved, and the legal situation in the Sonora Springs Bank Building never would be the same without Van.

Betty Holst went back where she came from originally, the college town of Bolton, a scant hundred miles away. That was three years ago, right after the divorce. Van continues to live in Sonora Springs, but he has to travel a bit in his new job. I guess he likes that; he says he does. It gives him a shift in scenery, he says. I said once Yeah, the time a guy reaches forty, he likes to see some new sights and faces now and then.

Forty, he said. Thanks for the compliment, but who are you trying to kid? Boy, you’re as old as I am, if you’re a day.

I clapped him on the back and went on. You can’t really rib Van, but it’s fun to try.

As I get it now, there was a guy in Van’s old set-up, Schweinhaupt, Holst, Hopkins, and Peters, that Van didn’t take to at all. Peters wasn’t in Van’s way at the office. He was a good man who knew his business and knew his place. But, he rubbed Van the wrong way. It wasn’t anything special, and Peters was Schweinhaupt’s protégé and fair-haired favorite, so Van kept silent. Van said he hadn’t even met Peters’ wife at the time he pulled out of the partnership to go with the trade association. I don’t know; that’s what he said.

I do know this: that Evangeline Peters—Vangie, they call her—is a knock-out. But trust her, I wouldn’t. Come a new fashion in hairdos, and, Mister, she’s the very first to try it out. With all her rakish, rusty-brown hair, she makes it look good, too, better than any of the others who come along afterwards and try it. The same with the sack dress or what-have-you. On her, the sack was effective. No matter how new or how careful her get-up, there is a casual disorder about Vangie, a sultry insouciance, a kind of pouting, challenging, green-eyed insolence that is fetching, that makes a man want to straighten her out, if you know what I mean.

I suppose it doesn’t matter whether Van Hummel Holst got to know Vangie Peters when Holst and Peters were partners, or later. He didn’t become well-acquainted with her till afterward—if he ever got well-acquainted. In June last year they both were guests at a small dinner-party at the Schweinhaupt home. Wickford Peters was in Chicago on the business of a cement company client at the time. In a natural gesture of friendliness, with no devious plots whatever in mind, Van asked Vangie if he could drive her home. She accepted. It was all open and above board. It all started simply.

Van made the first move, and he says his best recollection is that he didn’t make a second. So far as he can recall, nothing whatever was said when he took Vangie home, about music or the summer festival at Maroon Meadows. He couldn’t have said anything very definite because he hadn’t seen a program, didn’t know who was playing what. He knew there was an annual festival, and that was all. Vangie invited him in when they got home after the party, and he went in and had another drink or two with her. He may have made a couple of tentative, half-hearted, indefinite passes at her, but actually he was on his guard against her, against himself.

When he was telling me all this, I nodded and said: After all, she is married.

He replied, Of course. And besides, Man, I’m ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years older than she is. He fixed a wild eye on me and seemed to place a terrific importance on the barrier of age. He added, She’s young enough, almost, to be my daughter.

I was tempted to say, Is that bad? I remembered that his daughter, Elsa, had been quite a cute little number right up to her wedding day, the last time I had seen her, and I was willing to bet she still was. I said nothing.

There’s a saying that there’s no fool like an old fool, but I don’t like it especially. It overlooks how the very stars stray out of their orbit to give an assist against him when a man of dignity and maturity starts to fumble and stumble and gets set to make folly into a fine art.

Van and Vangie laid no plans that June evening. She, probably, was on her guard as well as he. Soon afterward, however, Vangie learned that Wickford would be out of town on business over the Fourth of July, which was on Monday last year. That could have been a blow to her. It could be that she called Van, as Van says. It certainly must have been Vangie who wanted to hear the all-Beethoven program at Maroon Meadows late Sunday afternoon, July 3. The idea of leaving Maroon Meadows after the concert and after dinner and driving all the way back to Sonora Springs that night, two hundred miles over the mountains, and catching up later, on the holiday, with the sleep lost—that idea may have seemed easily possible and quite practical in advance. In any case, they agreed on the adventure.

They started for the alpine fastness of Maroon Meadows Sunday afternoon. It was a grand, beautiful, exhilarating trip. The traffic, at floodtide the day before, Saturday, was negligible now. Vangie was fresh, lively, innocent, attractive—truly a girl on a lark. She exclaimed at everything along the road: the melodies of the meadow lark, the breathtaking, colorful flower-carpet of the pastures, the speck-like cattle lost in the immensity of the valleys, and their mountain backdrop. Had Wickford been holding her prisoner for months in some round tower of their suburban home, Vangie could not have been more pleased with her holiday with Van than she was.

The program in the big tent was lost on Van. He didn’t sleep through it, but he dozed. He was alternately too hot and too cold. He was sweetly conscious of Vangie at his side, of her generous flesh, her careless posture, and of those longish legs which seemed always to be getting in her own way. She was carried away by the performance. He could have slept without her noticing it. He was conscious of nothing but her and her perfume, with the swelling waves of music scarcely a distraction. She was intent on the orchestra and the piano soloist and unaware of him. After the concert, they had dinner at a cool, hidden-away dining room. Van kept up a line of cheerful chatter throughout the meal, but, though he didn’t mention it, he knew very well he couldn’t drive back to Sonora Springs that evening. It was useless even to begin. He was fairly used to day-long driving, but this had been different. He wasn’t so much exhausted as suffering from a complete failure of will. That was the way Van put it to me. He wasn’t playing a nasty, naughty trick on Vangie at all. He just couldn’t drive back. And, of course, her doing so was out of the question.

Vangie sized up the situation herself at dinner, apparently. When they had finished and gone out to the car, she said Van, darling, it was wonderful of you to do this for me. Tears came to her eyes. He made some awkward, mumbled protestation that it was nothing. She went on, But we can’t just go back again tonight, can we?

No, Vangie Sweet, we can’t, he said.

They stayed at the Graustark Inn incognito, registered as Mr. and Mrs. John Holmes. When they first went to their suite, they spoke in low tones of suppressed excitement of rising early, before others were stirring, and setting out on their return journey. The plan was perfect, but their execution of it was faulty: that is, human. It was close to noon the next day, the Fourth, when they got ready to leave. It seemed safe, therefore, to Vangie to have breakfast right at the Inn. Van overruled that emphatically and hurried through the lobby to the car as soon as he had paid the bill.

He expected to see Vangie already there, ahead of him. She wasn’t. He looked back. She was coming, but utterly changed. She looked crushed. Wonderingly, he held the car door open for her. She got in and slumped.

What’s the matter? he asked.

Do you want to see something? she replied in a taut, tense voice. The air with which she said it made him say No.

She wouldn’t be put off. Go back to the coffee shop, if you want to see something, she said.

Nothing on earth could make me go back now, he answered.

You want to know who’s having breakfast? In spite of her restraint, she was screaming. Wick’s in there having breakfast. Do you know who’s with him? Your wife from Bolton. Now do you want to go back?

No, he said, I have no wife in Bolton.

She tried to register his denial of a wife as if that were incomprehensible. She said nothing as he started the motor. She was dry-eyed as they pulled out of the Inn’s parking space. They were well along their way to Sonora Springs, with her completely oblivious to her surroundings all the while, when she began to weep softly and as one who can’t understand what it is she’s weeping about. Van felt sorry for her. He took her home; told her he wanted to help her in every way he could; telephoned her various times later in the daytime when he knew Wickford would be at the office to repeat his assurance. She said she appreciated his offers but needed nothing. He hasn’t seen her since.

An Afternoon Off

I

rwin Edman has made us all aware, of course, that philosophers have holidays. How many know, however, that they also have afternoons off, like maids and fauns? This may seem to be a terribly tiny bit of information, but as we shall see, it has rather unexpected ramifications.

One way of looking at it, the guys are darn lucky, now that summer sessions tread hard on the heels of the regular school year, to have any time at all for loitering, if only a half day. Leastwise, Hornsby Smith, Ph.D. and professor of Advanced Scholastic Philosophy at Cody College, considered himself indeed fortunate to have an entire early summer afternoon that he could call his own. It was his own because his wife didn’t know about it and because of an unanticipated leniency on the part of Hornsby’s dentist.

The appointment with Dr. Jaquith was at two o’clock, and a few minutes before that time Hornsby was telling the receptionist at the Kirby Dental Clinic that he was there. The mature, poised young woman at the desk was fairly new, but he had never seen her before. She was not pretty or petite, but she was striking, different, arresting, statuesque. She had big green eyes and as he looked into them now the girl asked, May I say who’s calling?

He told her Mr. Smith, and as he did his eyes left her face, descended to her firm, brown, thick shoulders and, oh-oh, darted swiftly down to the cream-white breasts which were exposed to his view as the receptionist leaned forward. These were held up, not to say thrust up, by the girl’s kindly dark bra, but his glimpse of them was momentary. How did her shoulders get so tanned so early in the season? Here it was only the first of June, and that’s early in Sonora Springs. Yes, the girl was saying, won’t you have a seat, Mr. Smith, and I’ll call you when the doctor’s ready.

Hornsby took a chair in the waiting room. Was that sudden revelation of the girl’s bosom accidental or intentional? He glanced at the receptionist’s careful hair-do. Not a strand of her tinted auburn hair was out of place. It was a becoming coiffure, if a trifle too short, too mannish for Hornsby’s taste. No, he thought, with that gal nothing happens by chance. By proving her femininity to me, she also proved it to herself, which was the more necessary.

You can go in now, Mr. Smith. He went down the hall to Dr. Jaquith’s office. Hornsby had been having a spot of trouble with one of his eye-teeth. He had just had a root-canal treatment, and now, he supposed, the dentist was going to fill the cavity—put on a crown or an inlay, or whatever. Dr. Jaquith took only a quick look, asked if there were any tenderness in the gum and then shunted his patient to the x-ray room. That will be all for today, he said. I want to have the x-ray developed before I do anything. The roentgenologist was through with Hornsby before he had a chance to say Jack Robinson.

The hour or two Hornsby had intended to put at the disposal of his dentist was a sudden windfall. What to do with it—oh yes, the parks must be nice at this time of the year, and Craftwood Park was close by; he’d try that.

He was relaxing comfortably on a park bench and facing directly into the sun when he spied, off to his left, the approach of a young woman in a sun suit with perhaps four or five or a half-dozen tiny tots in front of her, behind her, surrounding her. All evidently were headed for the swings some distance to his right. The little ones, catching sight of their goal, sped past in front of him as fast as their legs could carry them. The barefoot, bare-legged young woman didn’t alter her dignified, book-on-head pace.

She was a decided brunette of about twenty years. Her black, black hair had the inevitable, practical bob (darn it). Her face was moist, presumably from perspiration or lotion. She paid him no attention whatsoever as she descended into the ravine directly in front of him. He could see the cleft in her breasts from where he sat. She wasn’t bosomy, but she was well-built: neither skinny nor fat. Her navy blue suit, so tight-fitting above, had loosely flounced, scalloped legs of a slight straw color. When she passed by him so that he saw her retreating, the frills accentuated the wiggle of the hips in her walk.

Hornsby, now and then, glanced towards the swings. At first, the girl occupied herself with pushing the various children. Then she went over and sat down on the grass, slipped the straps off her shoulder, rubbed herself with oil all over, and like Hornsby, faced into the sun.

Is she the mother of one of the children, Hornsby asked himself. She could be. She’s old enough to be the mother of several of them, even. No, she’s not the mother but a maid. She’s probably better looking than any of the mothers. That’s the way it is; maids are always better looking than their employers. Wonder why that is. Besides, only a maid could interfere so little, rock the boat so little, and yet manage to participate in all the high-spirited good fun.

He knew she had noticed his intermittent gaze, for once when she returned from one of her brief tours of duty at the swings, she waggled her flounced rump at him and then, this time, deliberately turned her back on him when she sat down. He didn’t care. He had no wish to make love to the maid. Looking down into her eyes would settle none of the profound, philosophical problems that had been perplexing him for so long. He was satisfied to have seen what he had seen, and it was time to move on before he got sunburned. Then, too, he wanted to stop at the dry-cleaners on the way home.

Mrs. Rodriguez was on duty at the Spic-N-Span Cleaners when he arrived. She was a good-natured woman of about his age. He liked her, and she was always glad to see him and enjoyed pronouncing his name. Mr. Smith, she would say, with a cute accent, on the slightest pretext.

His slacks had been cleaned, and if you can wait just a minute, Mr. Smith, I’ll have them pressed. He could see that she would like to strike up a conversation. Would you like to sit down, Mr. Smith? Here she lifted a couple of blankets off a love-seat finished in leatherette from which the color was peeling. He remained standing, and she went back behind the counter. I thought you wanted the slacks on Thursday, the same as the jacket, she said. Otherwise, they’d be all set. Sometimes I goof. He nodded and smiled. We all do, he said.

Their eyes met at this exchange of amiable trivialities. Hers were brown, pleasant, but unsmiling, and she looked at him squarely. His were gray-blue, also unsmiling, and deeply penetrating. He waited, still standing. A belt loop had to be reinforced. He saw or felt or sensed that several times while she was running the needle through the belt loop, Mrs. Rodriguez shot swift glances up at him standing there. Her hands were as big as his own and as ring-less. She is so friendly, she is more than friendly, he thought. Her serious brown eyes not only give out an invitation; they are coaxing.

He looked at her as she went over to hang the slacks on the stand. Her hips were well padded and bulged out around her ample waist. Her neckline V-plunged but revealed nothing. That, of course, did not fool Hornsby’s practiced eye. Don’t pay me now, Mr. Smith, she said. Wait till you come for the jacket. He understood this probably meant the charge would be forgotten, but he assented. Mrs. Rodriguez wanted to make this little gesture, and he would let her. Okay, he said and took the pants and went out. As he went along the street, he hummed an old rhumba tune he knew. Ma-ma In-ez, Ma-ma In-ez.

When Hornsby got home, he did not impress Mrs. Smith as his usual, steady, and resigned self, and he