The Complete Short Stories. O. Hooper Henry

to eat — it’s worse than that man Esau, that swapped his copyright for a partridge — but then, hunger’s a fierce thing. You’ll excuse me, now, Jeff, for I smell a pervasion of ham frying in the distance, and my legs are crying out to stampede in that direction.’

      “‘A hearty meal to you, Ed Collier,’ I says to him, ‘and no hard feelings. For myself, I am projected to be an unseldom eater, and I have condolence for your predicaments.’

      “There was a sudden big whiff of frying ham smell on the breeze; and the Champion Faster gives a snort and gallops off in the dark toward fodder.

      “I wish some of the cultured outfit that are always advertising the extenuating circumstances of love and romance had been there to see. There was Ed Collier, a fine man full of contrivances and flirtations, abandoning the girl of his heart and ripping out into the contiguous territory in the pursuit of sordid grub. ’Twas a rebuke to the poets and a slap at the best-paying element of fiction. An empty stomach is a sure antidote to an overfull heart.

      “I was naturally anxious to know how far Mame was infatuated with Collier and his stratagems. I went inside the Unparalleled Exhibition, and there she was. She looked surprised to see me, but unguilty.

      “‘It’s an elegant evening outside,’ says I. ‘The coolness is quite nice and gratifying, and the stars are lined out, first class, up where they belong. Wouldn’t you shake these by-products of the animal kingdom long enough to take a walk with a common human who never was on a programme in his life?’

      “Mame gave a sort of sly glance around, and I knew what that meant.

      “‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I hate to tell you; but the curiosity that lives on wind has flew the coop. He just crawled out under the tent. By this time he has amalgamated himself with half the delicatessen truck in town.’

      “‘You mean Ed Collier?’ says Mame.

      “‘I do,’ I answers; ‘and a pity it is that he has gone back to crime again. I met him outside the tent, and he exposed his intentions of devastating the food crop of the world. ’Tis enormously sad when one’s ideal descends from his pedestal to make a seventeen-year locust of himself.’

      “Mame looked me straight in the eye until she had corkscrewed my reflections.

      “‘Jeff,’ says she, ‘it isn’t quite like you to talk that way. I don’t care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed. A man may do ridiculous things, but they don’t look ridiculous to the girl he does ’em for. That was one man in a hundred. He stopped eating just to please me. I’d be hard-hearted and ungrateful if I didn’t feel kindly toward him. Could you do what he did?’

      “‘I know,’ says I, seeing the point, ‘I’m condemned. I can’t help it. The brand of the consumer is upon my brow. Mrs. Eve settled that business for me when she made the dicker with the snake. I fell from the fire into the frying-pan. I guess I’m the Champion Feaster of the Universe.’ I spoke humble, and Mame mollified herself a little.

      “‘Ed Collier and I are good friends,’ she said, ‘the same as me and you. I gave him the same answer I did you — no marrying for me. I liked to be with Ed and talk with him. There was something mighty pleasant to me in the thought that here was a man who never used a knife and fork, and all for my sake.’

      “‘Wasn’t you in love with him?’ I asks, all injudicious. ‘Wasn’t there a deal on for you to become Mrs. Curiosity?’

      “All of us do it sometimes. All of us get jostled out of the line of profitable talk now and then. Mame put on that little lemon glace smile that runs between ice and sugar, and says, much too pleasant: ‘You’re short on credentials for asking that question, Mr. Peters. Suppose you do a forty-nine day fast, just to give you ground to stand on, and then maybe I’ll answer it.’

      “So, even after Collier was kidnapped out of the way by the revolt of his appetite, my own prospects with Mame didn’t seem to be improved. And then business played out in Guthrie.

      “I had stayed too long there. The Brazilians I had sold commenced to show signs of wear, and the Kindler refused to light up right frequent on wet mornings. There is always a time, in my business, when the star of success says, ‘Move on to the next town.’ I was travelling by wagon at that time so as not to miss any of the small towns; so I hitched up a few days later and went down to tell Mame goodbye. I wasn’t abandoning the game; I intended running over to Oklahoma City and work it for a week or two. Then I was coming back to institute fresh proceedings against Mame.

      “What do I find at the Dugans’ but Mame all conspicuous in a blue travelling dress, with her little trunk at the door. It seems that sister Lottie Bell, who is a typewriter in Terre Haute, is going to be married next Thursday, and Mame is off for a week’s visit to be an accomplice at the ceremony. Mame is waiting for a freight wagon that is going to take her to Oklahoma, but I condemns the freight wagon with promptness and scorn, and offers to deliver the goods myself. Ma Dugan sees no reason why not, as Mr. Freighter wants pay for the job; so, thirty minutes later Mame and I pull out in my light spring wagon with white canvas cover, and head due south.

      “That morning was of a praiseworthy sort. The breeze was lively, and smelled excellent of flowers and grass, and the little cottontail rabbits entertained themselves with skylarking across the road. My two Kentucky bays went for the horizon until it come sailing in so fast you wanted to dodge it like a clothesline. Mame was full of talk and rattled on like a kid about her old home and her school pranks and the things she liked and the hateful ways of those Johnson girls just across the street, ‘way up in Indiana. Not a word was said about Ed Collier or victuals or such solemn subjects. About noon Mame looks and finds that the lunch she had put up in a basket had been left behind. I could have managed quite a collation, but Mame didn’t seem to be grieving over nothing to eat, so I made no lamentations. It was a sore subject with me, and I ruled provender in all its branches out of my conversation.

      “I am minded to touch light on explanations how I came to lose the way. The road was dim and well grown with grass; and there was Mame by my side confiscating my intellects and attention. The excuses are good or they are not, as they may appear to you. But I lost it, and at dusk that afternoon, when we should have been in Oklahoma City, we were seesawing along the edge of nowhere in some undiscovered river bottom, and the rain was falling in large, wet bunches. Down there in the swamps we saw a little log house on a small knoll of high ground. The bottom grass and the chaparral and the lonesome timber crowded all around it. It seemed to be a melancholy little house, and you felt sorry for it. ’Twas that house for the night, the way I reasoned it. I explained to Mame, and she leaves it to me to decide. She doesn’t become galvanic and prosecuting, as most women would, but she says it’s all right; she knows I didn’t mean to do it.

      “We found the house was deserted. It had two empty rooms. There was a little shed in the yard where beasts had once been kept. In a loft of it was a lot of old hay. I put my horses in there and gave them some of it, for which they looked at me sorrowful, expecting apologies. The rest of the hay I carried into the house by armfuls, with a view to accommodations. I also brought in the patent kindler and the Brazilians, neither of which are guaranteed against the action of water.

      “Mame and I sat on the wagon seats on the floor, and I lit a lot of the kindler on the hearth, for the night was chilly. If I was any judge, that girl enjoyed it. It was a change for her. It gave her a different point of view. She laughed and talked, and the kindler made a dim light compared to her eyes. I had a pocketful of cigars, and as far as I was concerned there had never been any fall of man. We were at the same old stand in the Garden of Eden. Out there somewhere in the rain and the dark was the river of Zion, and the angel with the flaming sword had not yet put up the keep-off-the-grass sign. I opened up a gross or two of the Brazilians and made Mame put them on — rings, brooches, necklaces, eardrops, bracelets, girdles, and lockets. She flashed and sparkled like a million-dollar princess until she had pink spots in her cheeks and almost cried for a looking-glass.

      “When it got late I made a fine bunk on the floor for Mame with the hay and my lap robes and blankets out of the