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

fair and beautiful face appear in thees mee-ser-rhable house.” I opened my starboard eye. The beard was being curled furiously around a finger, the Svengali eye was rolling, the chair was being hunched closer to the schoolteacher’s. “I am French⁠—you see⁠—temperamental⁠—nervous! I cannot endure thees dull hours in thees ranch house; but⁠—a woman comes! Ah!” The shoulders gave nine ’rahs and a tiger. “What a difference! All is light and gay; ever’ting smile w’en you smile. You have ’eart, beauty, grace. My ’eart comes back to me w’en I feel your ’eart. So!” He laid his hand upon his vest pocket. From this vantage point he suddenly snatched at the schoolteacher’s own hand, “Ah! Mees Adams, if I could only tell you how I ad⁠—”

“Dinner,” remarked George. He was standing just behind the Frenchman’s ear. His eyes looked straight into the schoolteacher’s eyes. After thirty seconds of survey, his lips moved, deep in the flinty, frozen maelstrom of his face: “Dinner,” he concluded, “will be ready in two minutes.”

Miss Adams jumped to her feet, relieved. “I must get ready for dinner,” she said brightly, and went into her room.

Ross came in fifteen minutes late. After the dishes had been cleaned away, I waited until a propitious time when the room was temporarily ours alone, and told him what had happened.

He became so excited that he lit a stogy without thinking. “Yeller-hided, unwashed, palm-readin’ skunk,” he said under his breath. “I’ll shoot him full o’ holes if he don’t watch out⁠—talkin’ that way to my wife!”

I gave a jump that set my collarbone back another week. “Your wife!” I gasped.

“Well, I mean to make her that,” he announced.

The air in the ranch house the rest of that day was tense with pent-up emotions, oh, best buyers of best sellers.

Ross watched Miss Adams as a hawk does a hen; he watched Etienne as a hawk does a scarecrow, Etienne watched Miss Adams as a weasel does a henhouse. He paid no attention to Ross.

The condition of Miss Adams, in the role of sought-after, was feverish. Lately escaped from the agony and long torture of the white cold, where for hours Nature had kept the little schoolteacher’s vision locked in and turned upon herself, nobody knows through what profound feminine introspections she had gone. Now, suddenly cast among men, instead of finding relief and security, she beheld herself plunged anew into other discomforts. Even in her own room she could hear the loud voices of her imposed suitors. “I’ll blow you full o’ holes!” shouted Ross. “Witnesses,” shrieked Etienne, waving his hand at the cook and me. She could not have known the previous harassed condition of the men, fretting under indoor conditions. All she knew was, that where she had expected the frank freemasonry of the West, she found the subtle tangle of two men’s minds, bent upon exacting whatever romance there might be in her situation.

She tried to dodge Ross and the Frenchman by spells of nursing me. They also came over to help nurse. This combination aroused such a natural state of invalid cussedness on my part that they were all forced to retire. Once she did manage to whisper: “I am so worried here. I don’t know what to do.”

To which I replied, gently, hitching up my shoulder, that I was a hunch-savant and that the Eighth House under this sign, the Moon being in Virgo, showed that everything would turn out all right.

But twenty minutes later I saw Etienne reading her palm and felt that perhaps I might have to recast her horoscope, and try for a dark man coming with a bundle.

Toward sunset, Etienne left the house for a few moments and Ross, who had been sitting taciturn and morose, having unlocked Mark Twain, made another dash. It was typical Ross talk.

He stood in front of her and looked down majestically at that cool and perfect spot where Miss Adams’ forehead met the neat part in her fragrant hair. First, however, he cast a desperate glance at me. I was in a profound slumber.

“Little woman,” he began, “it’s certainly tough for a man like me to see you bothered this way. You”⁠—gulp⁠—“you have been alone in this world too long. You need a protector. I might say that at a time like this you need a protector the worst kind⁠—a protector who would take a three-ring delight in smashing the saffron-colored kisser off of any yeller-skinned skunk that made himself obnoxious to you. Hem. Hem. I am a lonely man, Miss Adams. I have so far had to carry on my life without the”⁠—gulp⁠—“sweet radiance”⁠—gulp⁠—“of a woman around the house. I feel especially doggoned lonely at a time like this, when I am pretty near locoed from havin’ to stall indoors, and hence it was with delight I welcomed your first appearance in this here shack. Since then I have been packed jam full of more different kinds of feelings, ornery, mean, dizzy, and superb, than has fallen my way in years.”

Miss Adams made a useless movement toward escape. The Ross chin stuck firm. “I don’t want to annoy you, Miss Adams, but, by heck, if it comes to that you’ll have to be annoyed. And I’ll have to have my say. This palm-ticklin’ slob of a Frenchman ought to be kicked off the place and if you’ll say the word, off he goes. But I don’t want to do the wrong thing. You’ve got to show a preference. I’m gettin’ around to the point, Miss⁠—Miss Willie, in my own brick fashion. I’ve stood about all I can stand these last two days and somethin’s got to happen. The suspense hereabouts is enough to hang a sheepherder. Miss Willie”⁠—he lassooed her hand by main force⁠—“just say the word. You need somebody to take your part all your life long. Will you mar⁠—”

“Supper,” remarked George, tersely, from the kitchen door.

Miss Adams hurried away.

Ross turned angrily. “You⁠—”

“I have been revolving it in my head,” said George.

He brought the coffee