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

with his dog. ‘I hope you won’t have too much trouble. Myself, I’m not never going to marry.’

“That was three years ago,” said Bell. “We came here to live. For a year we got along medium fine. And then everything changed. For two years I’ve been having something that rhymes first-class with my name. You heard the row upstairs this evening? That was a merry welcome compared to the usual average. She’s tired of me and of this little town life and she rages all day, like a panther in a cage. I stood it until two weeks ago and then I had to send out The Call. I located George in Sacramento. He started the day he got my wire.”

Mrs. Bell came out of the house swiftly toward us. Some strong excitement or anxiety seemed to possess her, but she smiled a faint hostess smile, and tried to keep her voice calm.

“The dew is falling,” she said, “and it’s growing rather late. Wouldn’t you gentlemen rather come into the house?”

Bell took some cigars from his pocket and answered: “It’s most too fine a night to turn in yet. I think Mr. Ames and I will walk out along the road a mile or so and have another smoke. I want to talk with him about some goods that I want to buy.”

“Up the road or down the road?” asked Mrs. Bell.

“Down,” said Bell.

I thought she breathed a sigh of relief.

When we had gone a hundred yards and the house became concealed by trees, Bell guided me into the thick grove that lined the road and back through them toward the house again. We stopped within twenty yards of the house, concealed by the dark shadows. I wondered at this maneuver. And then I heard in the distance coming down the road beyond the house, the regular hoofbeats of a team of horses. Bell held his watch in a ray of moonlight.

“On time, within a minute,” he said. “That’s George’s way.”

The team slowed up as it drew near the house and stopped in a patch of black shadows. We saw the figure of a woman carrying a heavy valise move swiftly from the other side of the house, and hurry to the waiting vehicle. Then it rolled away briskly in the direction from which it had come.

I looked at Bell inquiringly, I suppose. I certainly asked him no question.

“She’s running away with George,” said Bell, simply. “He’s kept me posted about the progress of the scheme all along. She’ll get a divorce in six months and then George will marry her. He never helps anybody halfway. It’s all arranged between them.”

I began to wonder what friendship was, after all.

When we went into the house, Bell began to talk easily on other subjects; and I took his cue. By and by the big chance to buy out the business in Mountain City came back to my mind and I began to urge it upon him. Now that he was free, it would be easier for him to make the move; and he was sure of a splendid bargain.

Bell was silent for some minutes, but when I looked at him I fancied that he was thinking of something else⁠—that he was not considering the project.

“Why, no, Mr. Ames,” he said, after a while, “I can’t make that deal. I’m awful thankful to you, though, for telling me about it. But I’ve got to stay here. I can’t go to Mountain City.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Missis Bell,” he replied, “won’t live in Mountain City, She hates the place and wouldn’t go there. I’ve got to keep right on here in Saltillo.”

“Mrs. Bell!” I exclaimed, too puzzled to conjecture what he meant.

“I ought to explain,” said Bell. “I know George and I know Mrs. Bell. He’s impatient in his ways. He can’t stand things that fret him, long, like I can. Six months, I give them⁠—six months of married life, and there’ll be another disunion. Mrs. Bell will come back to me. There’s no other place for her to go. I’ve got to stay here and wait. At the end of six months, I’ll have to grab a satchel and catch the first train. For George will be sending out The Call.”

The Snow Man

Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow. To men, it is something like a crucible in which their world melts into a white star ten million miles away. The man who can stand the test is a Snow Man; and this is his reading by Fahrenheit, Reaumur, or Moses’s carven tablets of stone.

Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River, and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was deepening. The flakes were as large as an hour’s circular tatting by Miss Wilkins’s ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting could promise. I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would be welcome as a snowbound pilgrim, both for hospitality’s sake and because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.

The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon where its builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds; but I feared the drift. Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in the hills⁠—the speaking tube of the four winds⁠—came roaring the voice of the proprietor to the little room on the top floor.

At my “hello,” a ranch hand came from an outer building and received my thankful horse. In another minute, Ross and I sat by a stove in the dining-room of the four-room ranch house, while the big, simple welcome of the household lay at my disposal. Fanned by the whizzing norther, the fine, dry snow was sifted and bolted through the