Thirty by O. Henry

America’s premiere short story author
William Nadel — editor and great, great, great nephew of the author — writes in this new collection:

"Why O Henry? Why now? The answer came in a local bookstore from a young science fiction writer. 'O Henry inspired me to become a writer!' she proclaimed. 'He knew how to tell a story and he knew how to create memorable characters!'

"Bold Venture Press has given me the chance to select what I feel are thirty of my great Uncle’s most interesting stories, including a 31st story — his only collaboration with another author, his 'pard' Al Jennings. Each story is prefaced with notes regarding the origins of stories, how they represent a simpler time in New York City and elsewhere, and how they remain relevant more than 100 years later. O Henry captured the essence of human want and desire like no other author before or since."

In addition to a comprehensive bibliography of O Henry's works, this volume features thirty-one stories:

The Caballero’s Way (first appearance of The Cisco Kid)
The Skylight Room
Hearts and Hands
A Retrieved Reformation
The Marionettes
While the Auto Waits
Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches
The Cactus
The Crucible
Nemesis and the Candy Man
After Twenty Years
The Trimmed Lamp
The Count and the Wedding Guest
The (original) Money Maze
Smith
The (New) Money Maze
The Last Leaf
Mammon and the Archer
The Cop and the Anthem
The Memento
The Fifth Wheel
The Unknown Quantity
The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock
The Purple Dress
The Discounters of Money
The Furnished Room
By Courier
The Romance of a Busy Broker
The Marry Month of May
Let Me Feel Your Pulse
Hard to Forget
The Gift of the Magi
Holding Up a Train

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781300218210

Book preview

Thanks to Phil Stephensen-Payne, for use of the O. Henry bibliography from PHILSP.COM

Copyright © 2021 William Nadel. All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 9798536288962

Paperback: $21.95; Hardcover: $39.95;

eBook: $9.99 USA

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and author.

All persons, places and events are fictitious, and any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

Printed and bound in the United States.

Published by Bold Venture Press

www.boldventurepress.com

978-1-300-21821-0

This book is dedicated to my dear wife Lynn, and to the memory of the person who signed his postcards and notes to me BA-7

Contents

Introduction

Copyright

Why O. Henry? Why Now?

William Sydney Porter and the O. Henry Prize Stories

The O. Henry Timeline

Introductory Words by O. Henry

Stories

The Caballero’s Way

The Skylight Room

Hearts and Hands

A Retrieved Reformation

The Marionettes

While the Auto Waits

Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches

The Cactus

Nemesis and the Candy Man

After Twenty Years

The Trimmed Lamp

The Count and the Wedding Guest

The (Original) Money Maze

Smith

The (New) Money Maze

The Last Leaf

Mammon and the Archer

The Cop and the Anthem

The Memento

The Fifth Wheel

The Unknown Quantity

The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock

The Purple Dress

The Discounters of Money

The Furnished Room

By Courier

The Romance of a Busy Broker

The Marry Month of May

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

The Gift of the Magi

Holding Up a Train

Bibliography Section

O. Henry Bibliography by William Nadel

Final Words of Wisdom and Delight By O. Henry

O. Henry Bibliography by Philsp.com

About the editor

About the publisher

Why O. Henry? Why Now?

The answer came in a local bookstore from a young science fiction writer. O. Henry inspired me to become a writer! she proclaimed.

What about O. Henry influenced you? I asked.

He knew how to tell a story and he knew how to create memorable characters!

I was intrigued and I asked more. What about his ironic endings; don’t they seem a little forced to you?

No, she said and added, That’s how real life works!

Then I remembered the words of a former Russian born co-worker. In Russia, we love O. Henry; he wrote about working people. The Russians so loved my relative that they issued a stamp honoring him in 1962 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his birth. They also published special editions of his stories.

Early in 2012 I stood amazed looking at a poster in my local post office displaying the upcoming commemorative stamps, and there staring out at me was my great, great, great uncle O. Henry. Finally, he was to be honored by a governmental entity after all these years! I stood there transfixed, thinking that he would have had a good laugh if he were alive to see this.

Weeks later I bought every sheet of the stamps that I could. The postal clerk asked me why I was buying them and I told her, This is the first time I have ever seen a relative of mine honored with a postage stamp.

Five years earlier I had walked through the Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina looking at the graves of O. Henry and my relatives wondering if I would ever get a chance to honor him. That idea repeated itself when I stood with my wife Lynn at the sidewalk plaque placed near where O. Henry had his Asheville office. Lynn and I also thought about my Uncle when we ate at his favorite watering hole, Pete’s Tavern, at the very same booth in New York City where he sat nearly a century earlier. We even had a family event there, and were amazed when the owner, a wonderful fellow named Buster, told us that no other O. Henry relative, as far as he knew had ever held an event there. We then all drank to the memory of O. Henry!

About two years ago Pulp Adventures reprinted my Uncle’s story about The Cisco Kid and featured it on the cover of its twentieth issue. Several months later I wrote Audrey Parente, the editor, with the fact that I was a relative of the author, and she asked me if I would like to do a book of O. Henry stories. Audrey has given me the chance as a relative to select what I feel are thirty of the most interesting of my Uncle’s stories with of course, Lynn’s help and suggestions. I have also included a thirty-first story written by both O. Henry and his pard Al Jennings. This is the only story that O. Henry planned to collaborate on with anyone. Though he got ideas from many others he never really collaborated with them.

Over the years, many have speculated about how Uncle Bill chose the name O. Henry to cover his real identity. On his trip to Texas from North Carolina he met Lollie Cave.

They eventually became very close in the Lone Star state. On the Cave property there lived a cat which Porter and Lollie called Henry. But the cat seemed to only respond when they called him O. Henry. In fact, Porter used that name in Lollie’s autograph book. While in prison in Ohio his memory of the name was reawakened by a reference to another O. Henry, a French chemist in a drug handbook. Although Lollie was very fond of Bill Porter, she chose to marry another—but never forgot her close friend!

So this William finally gets a chance to honor his forbear William and tell about how many of these stories came to be written, and how they represent a somewhat simpler time in New York City and other places in the United States and elsewhere. In these comments of mine I will refer to O. Henry frequently as Uncle Bill or versions of My Uncle for that is technically what he was; I only hope that he would approve of my leaving out all the greats revealing the generations separating him from me. I think he would have approved and had a good laugh about it. He would also have probably laughed at the relevance of his stories to this new century, but would be delighted with you reading them and finding them meaningful! It is my fond wish that you enjoy them as much as so many did so long ago!

William Sydney Porter and the O. Henry Prize Stories

As I write this, we are about to celebrate the One Hundredth anniversary of the O. Henry Prize Stories, a yearly collection of the year’s twenty best. I believe my Uncle Bill would be proud to know that what he tried to do assisting other writers is not forgotten. During his lifetime he was asked many times to give advice to budding writers, and whenever he could, he did! My Uncle was called a genius by his friend Mabel Wagnalls, and she was the daughter of a famous publisher. ("Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.) Uncle Bill brought the short story form into the twentieth century, and made it the domain of the ordinary person as well as those in the upper classes. However, to O. Henry ordinary people were not ordinary, they were the fabric of America. When William Sydney Porter died in 1910 in abject poverty, his friends chipped in to cover the cost of his last expenses. But these friends always missed their Bill greatly. They missed talking shop and drinking and just hanging out" with him. His friends so felt his loss in 1918, that they along with the assistance of the Society of Arts and Sciences created the O. Henry Memorial Award and chose the best stories of the year to publish in a single volume in 1919. Originally, they selected stories with characters [who] engage in a struggle or become involved in difficulties out of which they emerge successfully or unsuccessfully. The editors of the yearly volume also lived up to the intention that each story must take them [the readers] by the throat like the quinsy. O. Henry in his only interview gave a view of how writing should be done. You can’t write a story that’s got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You’ve got to get out in the streets, into crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life — that’s the stimulant for a story writer.

At the end of his life, Uncle Bill tried and tried to write a novel, but never could. Off the record he confided to his friend Bob Davis, I’m a failure. I always have the feeling that I want to get back somewhere, but I don’t know just where it is. That feeling is Nostalgia—a wanting to return to a place that never was really what we remember it as. For O. Henry, it was to become a better writer, and a better person. What he captured in his stories, and what is captured in the O. Henry Prize-winning stories of today is the embodiment of O. Henry’s wish. The 100th collection of prize stories was published by PENGUIN Random House, September 10, 2019, edited by Laura Furman.

The O. Henry Timeline

Although I mention much of William Sydney Porter’s history in my discussions about his stories, this timeline will help you see the events of his life in a full perspective, and in the era he lived, giving you a better view of who he was.

1862—William Sidney Porter is born September 11 to Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter and Mary Jane Porter at Greensboro, North Carolina. After his mother died in 1865, Dr. Porter, William and his older brother move in with his Aunt Lina and Dr. Porter’s mother. There he is educated by his Aunt Lina, a teacher. Porter would eventually change the spelling of his middle name to Sydney.

1879—Porter works as a helper in his Uncle Clark Porter’s drugstore, often making sketches of those who enter to buy drugs or gossip. By 1881 he gets his license as a pharmacist in North Carolina. One of those who happened to enter the drugstore as a very young woman was Sara Lindsay Coleman, my great, great, great aunt.

1882—Fearing that he was developing the family disease (Consumption/Tuberculosis), Porter travels to Texas with Dr. James Hall and his wife who will visit their sons in the Lone Star state. He then works as ranch hand on the Richard Hall property doing many odd jobs as he continues to draw and write in his spare time.

1884—After Richard Hall sells his ranch, Porter moves to Austin and lives with the Harrells, working in several positions and even as a druggist while still sketching and writing. He renews his acquaintance with Lollie Cave, a woman he met on his train ride to Texas. He calls her Polly-O, and they become very friendly. He calls a cat on her aunt’s property O. Henry and writes a reference to that in her autograph book. She would reject his offer of marriage because of his lack of a stable job and apparent future.

1887—On July 1, Porter elopes with Athol Estes, a fragile Austin beauty, after being hired by the newly-elected Texas Land Commissioner—Richard Hall—to work in the Texas Land Office as an assistant draftsman. Athol in her first pregnancy learned that what she suspected was true, like Will’s mother, she too had the dreaded disease Consumption and lost their first born, a son on May 6, 1888. Athol’s severe illness and almost death during her second pregnancy confirmed her own future fate, even though their second child Margaret was born September 30, 1889. Margaret, herself, would eventually die of the disease in adulthood.

1891—Richard Hall’s failure to become governor of Texas leads to Porter ending his job at the Land Office. With some experience at bookkeeping, he becomes Teller at the First National Bank of Austin. Although he tried his best in the Teller position, he was in a bank fraught with corruption, and some of the Federal monetary crimes were attributed to Porter. I truly believe that Porter himself was not actually corrupt, but he realized that as Teller he would be prosecuted, which he was.

1896—The Bank case initially dropped is then reopened while Porter is writing for the Houston Post. To avoid arrest and trial, Porter flees to New Orleans and then Honduras.

1897—Porter returns to Austin and is allowed to be with Athol as she is dying. Athol dies on July 25.

1898—Porter, still in deep mourning, does little to help his trial and basically accepts his fate. Found guilty of embezzlement, and with his appeal rejected, he is sentenced to five years in prison in Ohio. He begins his jail term in April. In prison he has jobs in the hospital ward area and finally winds up as bookkeeper for the prison.

1901—As a model prisoner, Porter gets his sentence shortened to little over three years. But a miracle happened while Porter was in prison—he became an excellent short story writer, turning out a dozen stories while behind bars! Released July 24, he takes the train to Pittsburgh where Athol’s parents and his daughter Margaret are now living. They have fallen on hard times since the family disgrace.

1902—Unhappy at living in Pittsburgh, Porter takes advantage of an offer to come to New York City and arrives in the Big Apple by May finding a home to his stories in the pages of Ainslee’s and Everybody’s magazines.

1903—Porter begins a lengthy contract at writing a story a week for the Sunday edition of The New York World newspaper. His first actual book, Cabbages and Kings, reaches the bookshops by the end of 1904. In 1906 his greatest book The Four Million appears.

1907—Porter becomes my Uncle Bill when he marries my great, great, great aunt Sara Lindsay Coleman on November 27. To support his new wife and daughter he works diligently to write and sell story after story. It becomes a strenuous effort to hold his family together, write, and develop fully into a husband and father. He constantly travels between New York City and the Ashville area in North Carolina, which is preferred by his new wife.

1910—A case of the flu further weakens Uncle Bill’s already ailing body, so that by the spring his New York friends are aware of his decline. He collapses in June, is taken to Polyclinic Hospital under a fake name, and dies in the early morning of June 5. His funeral is held two days later at The Little Church Around the Corner, and O. Henry is buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina forever residing near many of my other relatives and near the Smoky Mountains.

Introductory Words by O. Henry

By late 1908, Uncle Bill was becoming very difficult. Sara tried to handle him, but she could not. However, there was only one person who had some success at getting O. Henry to behave — even somewhat. That man was the 25-year-old Harry Peyton Steger, a Rhodes Scholar and friend of Arthur Page, the son of the Page of Doubleday, Page and Company. By early 1909, Doubleday had acquired the rights to all of Uncle Bill’s previous books done by McClure’s and all future hardcovers to be published — and Steger, the literary advisor and editor at Doubleday’s was a great O. Henry fan! Steger’s job was to be the liaison between Doubleday’s and its authors—and Steger relished the opportunity to work with Uncle Bill.

When O. Henry needed an advance to pay his bills or just see the town, it was Steger who authorized the payment. But Steger would exact better behavior from Uncle Bill. It was Steger who helped plan no less than six more collections of O. Henry stories. For future advances O. Henry had to follow Steger’s instructions which included giving an interview to The New York Times, sitting for photographs to be taken of the publicity-reluctant author, and recording promotional piece to help sell his new and reissued books. Uncle Bill complained, but he did follow Steger’s instructions. And this is how O. Henry left for us his voice and his Introductory Words for all future readers, which we reprint as our special introduction to this collection. (By the way if you want to hear it in his own voice, it is on Youtube — or better yet, go to the O. Henry Museum in Austin, Texas, and see where he lived with Athol. One further note, O. Henry did not like putting a period after O in his pen name, but he would more than often follow the dictates of his editors and publishers and do it anyway!)

***

This is William Sydney Porter speaking — better known to you, no doubt, as O. Henry!

I’m going to let you in on a few of my secrets in writing a short story. The most important of them, at least in my humble opinion, is to use characters and plots that are life-like. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction!

All of my stories are actual experiences that I have come across during my travels. My characters are facsimiles of actual people I’ve known! Most authors spend hours and I’m told even days laboring over outlines of stories they have in their minds. But, not I! In my way of thinking that’s a waste of good time. I just sit down and let my pencil do the rest!

Many people ask me how I manage to get that fine little twist in my stories. I always tell them — that the unusual is the ordinary rather than the unexpected. And if you people listening to me now start thinking about your own lives, I’m sure you’ll discover just as many odd experiences as I’ve had.

I hope that this little talk will be heard long after I’m gone! I want you all to continue reading my stories then too! Goodbye Folks!

STORIES

Notes on The Caballero’s Way

Here’s adventure … Here’s Romance … Here’s O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West — The Cisco Kid!

My great, great, great Uncle’s most famous creation was announced on television that way in the 1950’s. And something similar introduced the Kid also on radio for more than 1000 TV and radio adventures. Add about 30 movies, and you have a phenomenal number of offspring — all from one story written for the July 1907 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, and then reprinted in hardcover in The Heart of the West in October the same year.

William Sidney Porter left Greensboro, North Carolina, to a better climate for his health in 1882. Accompanied by Dr. James Hall and Hall’s wife, Porter went to live and work on cattle and sheep ranches of the Halls’ sons in Southwest Texas. One Hall son was Lee Red Hall, the Texas Ranger whose exploits are part of United States history. Lieutenant Sandridge in this tale is a tribute to Red, a Ranger turned Rancher, and one of the mentors to the young author.

But what about the Cisco Kid? Where did he come from?

Here’s my belief: The Cisco Kid seems to be an amalgam of several people, including: O. Henry’s nephew Bubba Goodman — said by family members to be a wild one, and about the age and physical description of Cisco at the time of the adventure; cowboy legends Billy the Kid (That’s where Kid comes from); and Frank James, the famed brother of Jesse James. Frank is Francisco in Spanish, and Cisco is often used as a nickname. O. Henry was fluent in Spanish from his time living in Southern Texas and Honduras and Spanish words are sprinkled throughout the adventure. Just remember: a jacal is a hut; gitanas are gypsies; a chivo is a goat; a vaquero is a cowboy or ranch hand; a tienda is a shop; El Chivato is a gangster; and quien sabes literally is the question who knows?

The Caballero’s Way

The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.

The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it — because he was quick-tempered — to avoid arrest — for his own amusement — any reason that came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.

Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest — oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more — the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed jacal near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking mescal. Back of the jacal a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff’s posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft melange of Spanish and English.

One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, ex officio, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said captain’s territory.

The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.

Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful couleur de rose through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.

The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away.

Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the Jacales, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid.

Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans to see them kick: if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with "quien sabes" and denials of the Kid’s acquaintance.

But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing — a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.

No use to ask them Mexicans, he said to Sandridge. "They’re afraid to tell. This hombre they call the Kid — Goodall is his name, ain’t it? — he’s been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run across him at — but I guess I don’t keer to say, myself. I’m two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about. But this Kid’s got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see. She lives in that jacal a hundred yards down the arroyo at the edge of the pear. Maybe she — no, I don’t suppose she would, but that jacal would be a good place to watch, anyway."

Sandridge rode down to the jacal of Perez. The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass-thatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral nearby. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves. The old Mexican lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a stupor from his mescal, and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes— so old his wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the jacal stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman.

The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him.

Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this. He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. He seemed to illuminate the shadow of the pear when he smiled, as though the sun were rising again. The men she had known had been small and dark. Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday.

As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.

The newly lighted sun-god asked for a drink of water. Tonia brought it from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter. Sandridge considered it necessary to dismount so as to lessen the trouble of her ministrations.

I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human heart; but I assert, by the chronicler’s right, that before a quarter of an hour had sped Sandridge was teaching her how to plait a six-strand rawhide stake-rope, and Tonia had explained to him that were it not for her little English book that the peripatetic padre had given her and the little crippled chivo, that she fed from a bottle, she would be very, very lonely indeed.

Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid’s fences needed repairing, and that the adjutant-general’s sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.

In his camp by the water hole Lieutenant Sandridge announced and reiterated his intention of either causing the Cisco Kid to nibble the black loam of the Frio country prairies or of haling him before a judge and jury. That sounded business-like. Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia’s slim, slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing lariata. A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.

The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the rear of the jacal. Thus he might bring down the kite and the humming-bird with one stone.

While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties. He moodily shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and then rode away, morose and un-satisfied. No true artist is uplifted by shooting an aged man carrying an old-style .38 bulldog.

On his way the Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of delight. He yearned for the woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty devotion. He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under the brush shelter, and tell him how the chivo was thriving on the bottle.

The Kid turned the speckled roan’s head up the ten-mile pear flat that stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. The roan whickered; for he had a sense of locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse; and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the end of a forty-foot stake-rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe’s straw-roofed hut.

More weird and lonesome than the journey of an Amazonian explorer is the ride of one through a Texas pear flat. With dismal monotony and startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way. The demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the parched traveller with its lush grey greenness. It warps itself a thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to lure the rider into blind and impassable spine-defended bottoms of the bag, leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass whirling in his head.

To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends hovering about.

But it was not so with the Kid and his mount. Winding, twisting, circling, tracing the most fantastic and bewildering trail ever picked out, the good roan lessened the distance to the Lone Wolf Crossing with every coil and turn that he made.

While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was a single-minded man of conventional ideas. He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it. It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its beginning as near as may be to these words:

Don’t you monkey with my Lulu girl

Or I’ll tell you what I’ll do —

and so on. The roan was inured to it, and did not mind.

But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own consent to refrain from contributing to the world’s noises. So the Kid, by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia’s jacal, had reluctantly allowed his song to die away — not because his vocal performance had become less charming to his own ears, but because his laryngeal muscles were aweary.

As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then, where the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the jacal and the hackberry tree on the edge of the arroyo. A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly openings. Then he dismounted, dropped the roan’s reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian. The roan, knowing his part, stood still, making no sound.

The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitered between the leaves of a clump of cactus.

Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the jacal, sat his Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble small fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six-strand plait.

Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A gun-scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six-shooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia’s fingers needed close attention.

And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid.

Remember, then, said Tonia, "you must not come again until I send for you. Soon he will be here. A vaquero at the tienda said to-day he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago. When he is that near he always comes. If he comes and finds you here he will kill you. So, for my sake, you must come no more until I send you the word."

All right, said the ranger. And then what?

And then, said the girl, you must bring your men here and kill him. If not, he will kill you.

He ain’t a man to surrender, that’s sure, said Sandridge. It’s kill or be killed for the officer that goes up against Mr. Cisco Kid.

He must die, said the girl. Otherwise there will not be any peace in the world for thee and me. He has killed many. Let him so die. Bring your men, and give him no chance to escape.

You used to think right much of him, said Sandridge.

Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon-tinted arm over the ranger’s shoulder.

But then, she murmured in liquid Spanish, I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man! And thou art kind and good, as well as strong. Could one choose him, knowing thee? Let him die; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me.

How can I know when he comes? asked Sandridge.

When he comes, said Tonia, "he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the lavandera, has a swift pony. I will write a letter to thee and send it by him, saying how