Short Fiction, O. Henry [best books to read for teens TXT] 📗

struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick, sounded my chest, stuck out my tongue, and asked him the price of cemetery lots in Pineville.

He lit his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. “Brother,” he said, after a while, “you are in a mighty bad way. There’s a chance for you to pull through, but it’s a mighty slim one.”

“What can it be?” I asked eagerly. “I have taken arsenic and gold, phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hydrotherapeutic baths, rest, excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything left in the pharmacopoeia?”

“Somewhere in these mountains,” said the doctor, “there’s a plant growing⁠—a flowering plant that’ll cure you, and it’s about the only thing that will. It’s of a kind that’s as old as the world; but of late it’s powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to hunt it up. I’m not engaged in active practice now: I’m getting along in years; but I’ll take your case. You’ll have to come every day in the afternoon and help me hunt for this plant till we find it. The city doctors may know a lot about new scientific things, but they don’t know much about the cures that nature carries around in her saddlebags.”

So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like Indians through brakes of pine⁠—road side, hill side, river side, mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant.

As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find. But we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled the heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous plant. Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home too fatigued to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until morning. This we kept up for a month.

One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old doctor, Amaryllis and I took a little walk under the trees near the road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes around them for their night’s repose.

“I’m glad you’re well again,” she said. “When you first came you frightened me. I thought you were really ill.”

“Well again!” I almost shrieked. “Do you know that I have only one chance in a thousand to live?”

Amaryllis looked at me in surprise. “Why,” said she, “you are as strong as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every night, and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you want?”

“I tell you,” said I, “that unless we find the magic⁠—that is, the plant we are looking for⁠—in time, nothing can save me. The doctor tells me so.”

“What doctor?”

“Doctor Tatum⁠—the old doctor who lives halfway up Black Oak Mountain. Do you know him?”

“I have known him since I was able to talk. And is that where you go every day⁠—is it he who takes you on these long walks and climbs that have brought back your health and strength? God bless the old doctor.”

Just then the old doctor himself drove slowly down the road in his rickety old buggy. I waved my hand at him and shouted that I would be on hand the next day at the usual time. He stopped his horse and called to Amaryllis to come out to him. They talked for five minutes while I waited. Then the old doctor drove on.

When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an encyclopaedia and sought a word in it. “The doctor said,” she told me, “that you needn’t call any more as a patient, but he’d be glad to see you any time as a friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopaedia and tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering plants, and also the name of a country girl in Theocritus and Virgil. What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?”

“I know what he meant,” said I. “I know now.”

A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet Lady Neurasthenia.

The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament.

And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black Oak Mountain⁠—take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting house in the pine-grove.

Absolute rest and exercise!

What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night?

The Friendly Call

When I used to sell hardware in the West, I often “made” a little town called Saltillo, in Colorado. I was always certain of securing a small or a large order from Simon Bell, who kept a general store there. Bell was one of those six-foot, low-voiced products, formed from a union of the West and the South. I liked him. To look at him you would think he should be robbing stage coaches or juggling gold mines with both hands; but he would sell you a paper of tacks or a spool of thread, with ten times more patience and courtesy than any saleslady in a city department store.

I had a twofold object in my last visit to Saltillo. One was to sell a bill of goods; the other to advise Bell of a chance that I knew of by which I was certain he could