Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (35 page)

“So,” he cried angrily, “you’ll
meet them hereafter at
Gravesend!
Never a whit. Come down, sir! Come down, miss!”

For a moment there was
only the jingle of harness as the nervous horses pranced. Then a figure stepped
to earth, a tall young man muffled to his high-bridged nose in a heavy cape,
and lifted down after him the cloaked figure of—

Miss Fanny Plumbe!

“Pray, Dr. Johnson,” she
said statelily, “why do you hinder us? What have we done?”

“You have diddled your
father, and all of us,” replied my companion sternly, “sending Bacon’s cypher
to Jack Rice here with those letters you gave up so meekly—once you had the
diamond that you might turn into journey-money.”

The chit’s composure was
wonderful.

“Why, sir,” she owned
with a smile, “you gave me a turn when you decyphered my last message by the
hand of Sally; whom indeed, Mr. Boswell—” turning to me— “I no longer dared
trust when she became so great with you. But confess, Dr. Johnson, my French
held you off, after all, until I was able to convey a new cypher to Jack by the
hand of the sailorman.”

“And Dr. Thomas was your
accomplice in making away with the gem?” I cried in uncontrollable curiosity.

“Be not so gullible,
Bozzy,” cried my companion impatiently, “trust me, Dr. Thomas knew never a word
of the matter until Miss here opened her mind to him in their close conference
on Christmas Day. ’Twas the hussy herself that conveyed her diamond to her
lover, that he might turn it into money for their elopement.”

“Nay, how? For she never
left the room.”

“But
Belle
did—and carried with her the diamond, affixed to her
riband by the hand of Miss Fanny. Out flies the dog to greet her friend the
neighbour lad in his mummer’s disguise; who apprised of the scheam, caresses
his canine friend and removes the brilliant in the same operation.”

“That is so, sir,” said
Jack Rice.

“Surely,” said Miss
Fanny, “surely I did no wrong, to convey my jewel to the man I mean to wed.”

“That’s as may be,” said
my friend, unrelenting, “but now, miss, do you accompany us back to the house,
for there’ll be no elopement this night.”

“Pray, sir,” said Dr.
Thomas earnestly, “be mollified. The lad is a good lad, and will have a
competence when once he turns twenty-one; and I have engaged to make one in
their flight and bless their union, which the surly Alderman opposes out of
mere ill nature.”

“To this I cannot be a
party,” began my authoritarian friend. The little clergyman was fumbling in his
pocket. He brought forth, not a weapon, but a prayer-book.

“
Do you, John, take this woman...” he
began suddenly.

“Hold, hold!” cried
Johnson.

“I do,” cried the lad in
a ringing voice.

“And do you, Fanny...”

Jack Rice pulled a
seal-ring from his finger.

“I do.”

“Then I pronounce you man
and wife.” The ring hung loose on the girl’s slim finger, but it stayed on. “You
are witnesses, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell,” cried the little clergyman. “Will not
you salute the bride?”

Dr. Johnson lifted his
great shoulders in concession.” I wish you joy, my dear.”

As the coach with its
strangely-assorted trio of honeymooners receded in the distance:

“Pray, Dr. Johnson,” said
I, “resolve me one thing. If the strange message was not Ogam, what was it?”

JOHNSON:
“Simple
English.”

BOSWELL:
“How can this be?”

JOHNSON:
“The
triangles and scratches along the edges of yonder paper were halved lines of
writing, and had only to be laid together to be read off.”

BOSWELL:
“Yet
how are the top and bottom of a single strip of paper to be laid together?”

JOHNSON:
“The
Spartans, of whom you yourself reminded me, did it by means of a staff or
scytale,
around which the strip is wound, edge to edge, both
for writing and for reading.”

BOSWELL:
“Hence
your search for a staff or broomstick.”

JOHNSON:
“Yes,
sir. Now it went in my mind, yonder one-legged man had a strange wooden leg,
which did not taper as they usually do, but was straight up and down like a
post. Was he perhaps both the emissary and the key? At the cost of a half-crown
I had it of him—carried it out of his sight that he might not babble of my
proceedings—and read the communication with ease.”

BOSWELL:
“This is most notable, sir. I will make sure to record it this very night.”

JOHNSON
:
“Pray,
Mr. Boswell, spare me that; for though the play-acting clergyman with his two
hundred pounds and his Welsh antiquities failed to deceive me, yet ’tis cold
truth that under my nose a green boy has conspired with a school-girl to steal
first a diamond and then the lass herself; so let’s hear no more on’t.”

You’ll be sorry you did this, Agnes!

Plum
pudding is one of the best known, but least sampled of Christmas dishes. It is
very difficult to prepare properly, as it takes much time and patience. It was
never made with plums ('plum' probably coming from a word meaning plump. )
Instead it is made from porridge, meat, raisins, currants, rum, brandy, flour,
sugar, butter, eggs and a variety of spices. Several objects like a button or a
ring would be mixed in with the pudding, which would have a special
significance to the finder. A poorly prepared pudding could be a great ordeal
for the diner……

The
legacy of O. Henry is the American short story. Eight years after his death,
the American Society of Arts and Sciences founded an award in his name that is
given to the best American efforts in that form each year. English professors
have coined the term “O. Henry twist” to describe the sudden ironic turn of
events that often conclude his stories. He drew on every aspect of American
life, from Manhattan to the frontier—places he had known first-hand.

Perhaps the most arresting fact
about O. Henry is that almost all his stories, thirteen volumes in all, were
written in the last six years of his life. When he died, he left enough
unpublished material to fill four additional collections.

Porter spent much of his life travelling.
He even served some time in jail on a charge of embezzlement. By the time he
got around to setting his stories down on paper, he had probably told them many
times over. Although he could be ironic and fatalistic about situations, he was
never bitter. His stories had a folksy, humanistic touch that made him a
durable storyteller, one of America s best loved.

“A Chaparral Christmas Gift” comes
from the collection
Whirligigs
, published in the last
year of his life. It is a thoughtful story, well told, about the West that
Porter knew in his younger days. American crime fiction owes much to the style
and substance of O. Henry. His influence can be traced through succeeding
generations of writers as diverse as Damon Runyon and Dashiell Hammett, to works
on which the ink is yet undried.

The original cause
of
the trouble was about twenty years in growing.

At the end of that time
it was worth it.

Had you lived anywhere
within fifty miles of Sundown Ranch you would have heard of it. It possessed a quantity
of jet-black hair, a pair of extremely frank, deep-brown eyes and a laugh that
rippled across the prairie like the sound of a hidden brook. The name of it was
Rosita McMullen; and she was the daughter of old man McMullen of the Sundown
Sheep Ranch.

There came riding on red
roan steeds—or, to be more explicit, on a paint and a flea-bitten sorrel—two
wooers. One was Madison Lane, and the other was the Frio Kid. But at that time
they did not call him the Frio Kid, for he had not earned the honours of special
nomenclature. His name was simply Johnny McRoy.

It must not be supposed
that these two were the sum of the agreeable Rosita’s admirers. The bronchos of
a dozen others champed their bits at the long hitching rack of the Sundown
Ranch. Many were the sheeps’-eyes that were cast in those savannas that did not
belong to the flocks of Dan McMullen. But of all the cavaliers, Madison Lane
and Johnny McRoy galloped far ahead, wherefore they are to be chronicled.

Madison Lane, a young
cattleman from the Nueces country, won the race. He and Rosita were married one
Christmas day. Armed, hilarious, vociferous, magnanimous, the cowmen and the
sheepmen, laying aside their hereditary hatred, joined forces to celebrate the
occasion.

Sundown Ranch was
sonorous with the cracking of jokes and six-shooters, the shine of buckles and
bright eyes, the outspoken congratulations of the herders of kine.

But while the wedding
feast was at its liveliest there descended upon it Johnny McRoy, bitten by
jealousy, like one possessed.

“I’ll give you a
Christmas present,” he yelled, shrilly, at the door, with his. 45 in his hand.
Even then he had some reputation as an offhand shot.

His first bullet cut a
neat underbit in Madison Lane’s right ear. The bar
rel
of his gun moved an inch. The next shot would have been the bride’s had not
Carson, a sheepman, possessed a mind with triggers somewhat well oiled and in
repair. The guns of the wedding party had been hung, in their belts, upon nails
in the wall when they sat at table, as a concession to good taste. But Carson,
with great promptness, hurled his plate of roast venison and frijoles at McRoy,
spoiling his aim. The second bullet, then, only shattered the white petals of a
Spanish dagger flower suspended two feet above Rosita’s head.