41 Stories by O. Henry

me if I was to call? For,’ I goes on, ‘if you said I might come and see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.’
    â€œ ‘I must not talk to you,’ she says, ‘because we have not been introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say good-bye, Mr.—’
    â€œ ‘Say the name,’ says I. ‘You haven’t forgotten it.’
    â€œ ‘Pescud,’ says she, a little mad.
    â€œ ‘The rest of the name!’ I demands, cool as could be.
    â€œ ‘John,’ says she.
    â€œ ‘John—what ?’ I says.
    â€œ ‘John A.,’ says she, with her head high. ‘Are you through, now?’
    â€œ ‘I’m coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,’ I says.
    â€œ ‘He’ll feed you to his fox-hounds,’ says she, laughing.
    â€œ ‘If he does, it’ll improve their running,’ says I. ‘I’m something of a hunter myself.’
    â€œ ‘I must be going in now,’ says she. ‘I oughtn’t to have spoken to you at all. I hope you’ll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis—or Pittsburgh, was it? Good-bye!’
    â€œ ‘Good-night,’ says I, ‘and it wasn’t Minneapolis. What’s your name, first, please?’
    â€œShe hesitated. Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:
    â€œ ‘My name is Jessie,’ says she.
    â€œ ‘Good-night, Miss Allyn,’ says I.
    â€œThe next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the doorbell of that World’s Fair main building. After about three quarters of an hour an old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted. I gave him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel. He showed me in.
    â€œSay, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut? That’s what that house was like. There wasn’t enough furniture in it to fill an eight-dollar flat. Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye. But when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up. You could almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs and white stockings dancing a quadrille. It was the style of him, although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the station.
    â€œFor about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass. But I got my nerve back pretty quick. He asked me to sit down, and I told him everything. I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati, and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and explained to him my little code of living—to be always decent and right in your home town; and when you’re on the road never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit. At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window, but I kept on talking. Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocketbook and the grass widow—you remember that story. Well, that got him to laughing, and I’ll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.
    â€œWe talked two hours. I told him everything I knew; and then he began to ask questions and I told him the rest. All I asked of him was to give me a chance. If I couldn’t make a hit with the little lady, I’d clear out, and not bother any more. At last he says:
    â€œ ‘There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I remember rightly.’
    â€œ ‘If there was,’ says I, ‘he can’t claim kin with our bunch. We’ve always lived in and around Pittsburgh. I’ve got an uncle in the real-estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas. You can inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old