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Page 67
"Come," said he, persuasively, "I think better of you than to suppose
that you try this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of a
fever-crazed lunatic come some time to a limit. What is this talk
about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that
absurd cane-chopper. What would Miss Greene think of you?" he ended,
with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child.
"Listen," said I. "At last you have struck upon the right note. What
would she think of me? Listen," I repeated.
"There are women," I said, "who look upon horsehair sofas and currant
wine as dross. To them even the calculated modulation of your well-
trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree in
the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the
villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the
young men who would win them.
One such as they," I said, "is waiting. Only a fool would try to win
a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway or by waiting upon
her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias, and to
gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them
with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Devoe. Do not be a
coward as well as a chatterer at a lady's tea-table."
"There, there!" said Devoe, falteringly. "You know me, don't you,
Rayburn?"
"Oh yes," I said, "I know you. I know you. I know you. But the
basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and
both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls walk back
and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we have
a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad
form. But the basket is waiting for your head."
With that he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to
scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a
foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed
repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself
as a gentleman not to make a row.
But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete.
It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or
seven blows that it took to sever his head; but finally he lay still,
and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and shut
thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet with the
drip, but what did that matter? With delight I felt under my hands
the crisp touch of his short, thick, brown hair and close-trimmed
beard.
I reached the house of the Greenes and dumped the head of Louis Devoe
into the basket that still hung by the nail in the door-jamb. I sat
in a chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two hours
of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.
"Where have you been, Tommy?" she asked. "You were gone when I came
out."
"Look in the basket," I said, rising to my feet. She looked, and gave
a little scream--of delight, I was pleased to note.
"Oh, Tommy!" she said. "It was just what I wanted you to do. It's
leaking a little, but that doesn't matter. Wasn't I telling you?
It's the little things that count. And you remembered."
Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her
white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped
upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.
"Little things, indeed!" I thought again. "The head-hunters are
right. These are the things that women like you to do for them."
Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at
me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.
"You think of me," she said. "You are the man I was describing. You
think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth
living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me
happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December
if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have
no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You
please me very well, Tommy."
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