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Page 41
Perhaps there never was a stranger wedding. For, wedding it was, though
only two of those present knew it. When the ceremony was over, the
cow-punchers gave one yell of congratulation and immediately abandoned
their foolery for the night. Blankets were unrolled and sleep became the
paramount question.
The cook (divested of his decorations) and the Marquis lingered for a
moment in the shadow of the grub wagon. The Marquis leaned her head
against his shoulder.
"I didn't know what else to do," she was saying. "Father was gone, and
we kids had to rustle. I had helped him so much with the cattle that I
thought I'd turn cowboy. There wasn't anything else I could make a
living at. I wasn't much stuck on it though, after I got here, and I'd
have left only--"
"Only what?"
"You know. Tell me something. When did you first--what made you--"
"Oh, it was as soon as we struck the camp, when Saunders bawled out 'The
Marquis and Miss Sally!' I saw how rattled you got at the name, and I
had my sus--"
"Cheeky!" whispered the Marquis. "And why should you think that I
thought he was calling me 'Miss Sally'?"
"Because," answered the cook, calmly, "I was the Marquis. My father was
the Marquis of Borodale. But you'll excuse that, won't you, Sally? It
really isn't my fault, you know."
A FOG IN SANTONE
[Published in The Cosmopolitan, October, 1912. Probably
written in 1904, or shortly after O. Henry's first
successes in New York.]
The drug clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the
high-turned overcoat collar.
"I would rather not supply you," he said doubtfully. "I sold you a dozen
morphine tablets less than an hour ago."
The customer smiles wanly. "The fault is in your crooked streets. I
didn't intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up.
Excuse me."
He draws his collar higher, and moves out, slowly. He stops under an
electric light at the corner, and juggles absorbedly with three or four
little pasteboard boxes. "Thirty-six," he announces to himself. "More
than plenty." For a gray mist had swept upon Santone that night, an
opaque terror that laid a hand to the throat of each of the city's
guests. It was computed that three thousand invalids were hibernating in
the town. They had come from far and wide, for here, among these
contracted river-sliced streets, the goddess Ozone has elected to
linger.
Purest atmosphere, sir, on earth! You might think from the river winding
through our town that we are malarial, but, no, sir! Repeated
experiments made both by the Government and local experts show that our
air contains nothing deleterious--nothing but ozone, sir, pure ozone.
Litmus paper tests made all along the river show--but you can read it
all in the prospectuses; or the Santonian will recite it for you, word
by word.
We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then,
cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of
the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the
tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing
fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers
of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to
the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers.
On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving
behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three
came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys,
sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath
into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came
handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.
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