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COLLECTED SHORT STORIES • XIII
One night he took twelve of us and waded through a little rill
about a hundred and ninety yards wide, and climbed a couple
of mountains, and sneaked through a mile of neglected shrubbery and a couple of rock-quarries and into a rye-straw village,
and captured a Spanish general named, as they said, Benny
Veedus. Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being
a blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw himself on the commissary of his foe.
“But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The
San Augustine News and the Galveston, St. Louis, New York,
and Kansas City papers printed his picture and columns of
stuff about him. Old San Augustine simply went crazy over
its ‘gallant son.’ The News had an editorial tearfully begging
the Government to call off the regular army and the national
guard, and let Willie carry on the rest of the war single-handed. It said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as a proof
that the Northern jealousy of the South was still as rampant
as ever.
“If the war hadn’t ended pretty soon, I don’t know to what
heights of gold braid and encomiums Willie would have
climbed; but it did. There was a secession of hostilities just
three days after he was appointed a colonel, and got in three
more medals by registered mail, and shot two Spaniards while
they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.
“Our company went back to San Augustine when the war
was over. There wasn’t anywhere else for it to go. And what do
you think? The old town notifi ed us in print, by wire cable,
special delivery, and a nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule
to San Antone, that they was going to give us the biggest blow-
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O. HENRY
out, complimentary, alimentary, and elementary, that ever disturbed the kildees on the sand-fl ats outside of the immediate
contiguity of the city.
“I say ‘we,’ but it was all meant for ex-Private, Captain de
facto, and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy
about him. They notifi ed us that the reception they were going
to put up would make the MardI Gras in New Orleans look
like an afternoon tea in Bury St. Edmunds with a curate’s aunt.
“Well, the San Augustine Rifl es got back home on schedule time. Everybody was at the depot giving forth RooseveltDemocrat –they used to be called Rebel –yells. There was two
brass-bands, and the mayor, and schoolgirls in white frightening the street-car horses by throwing Cherokee roses in the
streets, and –well, maybe you’ve seen a celebration by a town
that was inland and out of water.
“They wanted Brevet-Colonel Willie to get into a carriage
and be drawn by prominent citizens and some of the city aldermen to the armory, but he stuck to his company and marched
at the head of it up Sam Houston Avenue. The buildings on
both sides was covered with fl ags and audiences, and everybody hollered ‘Robbins!’ or ‘Hello, Willie!’ as we marched up
in fi les of fours. I never saw a illustriouser-looking human in
my life than Willie was. He had at least seven or eight medals
and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khakI coat;
he was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done
himself proud.
“They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated at half-past seven, and there would be speeches and
chili-con-carne at the Palace Hotel. Miss Delphine Thompson
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COLLECTED SHORT STORIES • XIII
was to read an original poem by James Whitcomb Ryan, and
Constable Hooker had promised us a salute of nine guns from
Chicago that he had arrested that day.
“After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me:
“’Want to walk out a piece with me?’
“’Why, yes,’ says I, ‘if it ain’t so far that we can’t hear the tumult and the shouting die away. I’m hungry myself,’ says I, ‘and
I’m pining for some home grub, but I’ll go with you.’
“Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to
a little white cottage in a new lot with a twenty-by-thirty-foot
lawn decorated with brickbats and old barrel-staves.
“’Halt and give the countersign,’ says I to Willie. ‘Don’t
you know this dugout? It’s the bird’s-nest that Joe Granberry
built before he married Myra Allison. What you going there
for?’
“But Willie already had the gate open. He walked up the
brick walk to the steps, and I went with him. Myra was sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, sewing. Her hair was
smoothed back kind of hasty and tied in a knot. I never noticed
till then that she had freckles. Joe was at one side of the porch,
in his shirt-sleeves, with no collar on, and no signs of a shave,
trying to scrape out a hole among the brickbats and tin cans to
plant a little fruit-tree in. He looked up but never said a word,
and neither did Myra.
“Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on his breast and his new gold-handled sword.
You’d never have taken him for the little white-headed snipe
that the girls used to order about and make fun of. He just
stood there for a minute, looking at Myra with a peculiar little
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O. HENRY
smile on his face; and then he says to her, slow, and kind of
holding on to his words with his teeth:
“’Oh, I don’t know! Maybe I could if I tried!’
“That was all that was said. Willie raised his hat, and we
walked away.
“And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of
a sudden, the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair
before the looking-glass, and Myra sticking her head in the
door to guy him.
“When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:
“’Well, so long, Ben. I’m going down home and get off my
shoes and take a rest.’
“’You?’ says I. ‘What’s the matter with you? Ain’t the courthouse jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the
hero? And two brass-bands, and recitations and fl ags and jags
and grub to follow waiting for you?’
“Willie sighs.
“’All right, Ben,’ says he. ‘Darned if I didn’t forget all about
that.’
“And that’s why I say,” concluded Ben Granger, “that you
can’t tell where ambition begins any more than you can where
it is going to wind up.”
THE HEAD-HUNT ER
When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over,
I went to the Philippine Islands. There I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for my paper until its managing editor
notifi ed me that an eight-hundred-word cablegram describing
the grief of a pet carabao over the death of an infant Moro was
not considered by the offi ce to be war news. So I resigned, and
came home.
On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird
archipelago of the yellow-brown people. The manœuvres and
skirmishings of the petty war interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable countenance of that
race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon us out of an
unguessable past.
Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim, fl inty, relentless
little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by
the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the
trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous
mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable
jungles, always near with the invisible hand of death uplifted,
35
O. HENRY
betraying their pursuit only by such signs as a beast or a bird
or a gliding serpent might make –a twig crackling in the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the
rushes of a water-level –a hint of death for every mile and
every hour –they amused me greatly, those little fellows of
one idea.
When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost hilariously effective and simple.
You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that was decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a basket made of green withes, plaited. From
time to time, as vanity or ennuI or love or jealousy or ambition
may move you, you creep forth with your snickersnee and take
up the silent trail. Back from it you come, triumphant, bearing
the severed, gory head of your victim, which you deposit with
pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your door. It may
be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger, according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been
your incentive to labor.
In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in
passing, stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life stops to admire and praise the begonias in
your front yard. Your particular brown maid lingers, with
fl uttering bosom, casting soft tiger’s eyes at the evidence of
your love for her. You chew betel-nut and listen, content, to
the intermittent soft drip from the ends of the severed neck
arteries. And you show your teeth and grunt like a waterbuffalo –which is as near as you can come to laughing –at
36
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES • XIII
the thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.
Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me.
He had reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take
your adversary’s head, to basket it at the portal of your castle,
to see it lying there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone – Is there a better way to foil his plots,
to refute his arguments, to establish your superiority over his
skill and wisdom?
The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who changed his course and deposited me, with
genuine compassion, in a small town on the Pacifi c coast of
one of the Central American republics, a few hundred miles
south of the port to which he had engaged to convey me. But
I was wearied of movement and exotic fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the fi rm sands of the village of Mojada, telling
myself I should be sure to fi nd there the rest that I craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than
to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East,
and there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged
by fatuous relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors
sad stories of the death of colonial governors.
When I fi rst saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in
white, in the doorway of her father’s tile-roofed ‘dobe house.
She was polishing a silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like
a pearl laid against black velvet. She turned on me a fl atter-
37
O. HENRY
ingly protracted but a wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then
went inside, humming a light song to indicate the value she
placed upon my existence.
Small wonder: for Dr. Stamford (the most disreputable
professional man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were
zigzagging along the turfy street, tunelessly singing the words
of “Auld Lang Syne” to the air of “Muzzer’s Little Coal-Black
Coon.” We had come from the ice factory, which was Mojada’s
palace of wickedness, where we had been playing billiards and
opening black bottles, white with frost, that we dragged with
strings out of old Sandoval’s ice-cold vats.
I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the
verger of a cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we
were swine cast before a pearl.
“You beast,” I said, “this is half your doing. And the other
half is the fault of this cursed country. I’d better have gone
back to Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine
and buns than to have had this happen.”
Stamford fi lled the empty street with his roaring laughter.
“You too!” he cried. “And all as quick as the popping of
a cork. Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina.
But don’t burn your fi ngers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis
Devoe is the man.
“We will see about that,” said I. “And, perhaps, whether he
is a man as well as the man.”
I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished, for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce
a dozen; and they gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by
a Turk, where they managed to patch together the fl uttering
38
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES • XIII
rags of country and civilization that were left them. I sought
Devoe before I did my pearl of the doorway, because I had
learned a little of the game of war, and knew better than to
strike for a prize before testing the strength of the enemy.
A sort of cold dismay –something akin to fear –fi lled me
when I had estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised,
so charming, so deeply learned in the world’s rituals, so full
of tact, courtesy, and hospitality, so endowed with grace and
ease and a kind of careless, haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in turning him on the
spit to fi nd the weak point that I so craved for him to have.
But I left him whole –I had to make bitter acknowledgment
to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best
blows; and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant
of the country, a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he
sat in a fastidiously appointed offi ce, surrounded by works of
art and evidences of his high culture, directing through glass
doors and windows the affairs of his house.
In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, wellshaped head was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed
short, and he wore a thick, brown beard also cut close and to
a fi ne point. His manners were a pattern.
Before long I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like
a worn-out cloak. I trained for the confl ict with the care of
a prize-fi ghter and the self-denial of a Brahmin.
As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets
to her eyebrow. She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin, and no more mysterious than
39
O. HENRY
a window-pane. She had whimsical little theories that she had
deduced from life, and that fi tted the maxims of Epictetus like
princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old duffer wasn’t
rather wise!
Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Greene, and an intermittent mother, who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with
a life-work. He was writing a concordance to the Scriptures,
and had arrived as far as Kings. Being, presumably, a suitor for
his daughter’s hand, I was timber for his literary outpourings.
I had the family tree of Israel drilled into my head until I used
to cry aloud in my sleep: “And Aminadab begat Jay Eye See,”
and so forth, until he had tackled another book. I once made
a calculation that the Reverend Homer’s concordance would
be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about the third day after they were opened.
Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate
friend of the Greenes. It was there I met him the oftenest, and
a more agreeable man or a more accomplished I have never
hated in my life.
Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy.
My appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and homeless air that always draws the motherliness that
is in women and the cursed theories and hobbies of paterfamilias.
Chloe called me “Tommy,” and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo her. With Devoe she was vastly more reserved.
He was the man of romance, one to stir her imagination and
deepest feelings had her fancy leaned toward him. I was clos-
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