But O. Henry served the "light garnish" first. His "two pheasants" were the Rolling Stone and his column in the Houston Daily Post. His more "substantial stuff" came after these, but was not the natural outgrowth from them.

Nothing that he had written for these two publications was selected by him for reproduction in the volumes of his short stories. The so-called stories that he read to Mrs. Hall on the ranch and those that appeared now and then in the Rolling Stone were sketches or extravaganzas rather than real stories at grips with real life. "I was amazed," said Mrs. Hall, "when I learned that O. Henry was our Will Porter. I had thought that he might be a great cartoonist but had never thought of his being a master of the modern short story."

O. Henry was now to begin a period of severe trial and of prolonged and unmerited humiliation. But he was to come out of it all with purpose unified and character deepened. Experience with the seamy side of life was to do for him what aimless experimentation with literary forms would never have done.

CHAPTER

SIX

THE SHADOWED YEARS

WHEN O. Henry left Houston, never to return, he left because he was summoned to come immediately to Austin and stand trial for alleged embezzlement of funds while acting as paying and receiving teller of the First National Bank of Austin. The indictments charged that on October 10, 1894, he misappropriated $554.48; on November 12, 1894, $299.60; and on November 12, 1895, $299.60.

Had he gone he would certainly have been acquitted. He protested his innocence to the end. "A victim of circumstances" is the verdict of the people in Austin who followed the trial most closely. Not one of them, so far as I could learn after many interviews, believed or believe him guilty of wrong doing. It was notorious that the bank, long since defunct, was wretchedly managed. Its patrons, following an old custom, used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars, and say a week later: "Porter, I took out two hundred dollars last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to." It must have recalled to O. Henry the Greensboro drug store. Long

*

before the crash came, he had protested to his friends that it was impossible to make the books balance. "The affairs of the bank," says Mr. Hyder E. Rollins,* of Austin, "were managed so loosely that Porter's predecessor was driven to retirement, his successor to attempted suicide.”

There can be no doubt that O. Henry boarded the train at Houston with the intention of going to Austin. I imagine that he even felt a certain sense of relief that the charge, which had hung as a dead albatross about his neck, was at last to be unwound, and his innocence publicly proclaimed. His friends were confident of his acquittal and are still confident of his innocence. If even one of them had been with O. Henry, all would have been different. But when the train reached Hempstead, about a third of the way to Austin, O. Henry had had time to pass in review the scenes of the trial, to picture himself a prisoner, to look into the future and see himself marked with the stigma of suspicion. His imagination outran his reason, and when the night train passed Hempstead on the way to New Orleans, O. Henry was on it.

His mind seems to have been fully made up. He was not merely saving himself and his family from a public humiliation, he was going to start life over again in a new place. His knowledge of Spanish and

*The Bookman, New York, October, 1914.

his ignorance of Honduras made the little Central American republic seem just the haven in which to cast anchor. How great the strain was can be measured in part by the only reference of the sort, so far as I know, that O. Henry ever made to his life in the little Latin American country: "The freedom, the silence, the sense of infinite peace, that I found here, I cannot begin to put into words." His letters to Mrs. Porter from Honduras show that he had determined to make Central America his home, and that a school had already been selected for the education of his daughter.

How long O. Henry remained in New Orleans, on his way to or from Honduras, is not known; long enough, however, to draw the very soul and body of the Crescent City into the stories that he was to write years afterward. With his usual flair for originality, he passes by Mardi Gras, All Saints' Day, Quatorze Juillet, and crevasses; but in "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking," "The Renaissance of Charleroi," "Cherchez La Femme," and "Blind Man's Holiday," he has pictured and interpreted New Orleans and its suburbs as only one who loved and lived the life could do.

It is probable that he merely passed through New Orleans on his way to Honduras and took the first available fruit steamer for the Honduran coast, arriv

ing at Puerto Cortez or Criba or Trujillo. At any rate, he was in Trujillo and was standing on the wharf when he saw a man in a tattered dress suit step from a newly arrived fruit steamer. "Why did you leave so hurriedly?" asked O. Henry. "Perhaps for the same reason as yourself," replied the stranger. "What is your destination?" inquired O. Henry. "I left America to keep away from my destination," was the reply; "I'm just drifting. How about yourself?" "I can't drift," said O. Henry; "I'm anchored."

The stranger was Al Jennings, the leader of one of the most notorious gangs of train robbers that ever infested the Southwest. In "Beating Back," which Mr. Jennings was to publish eighteen years later, one may read the frank confession and life story of an outlaw and ex-convict who at last found himself and "came back" to live down a desperate past. That he has made good may be inferred from the spirit of his book, from the high esteem in which he is held by friends and neighbours, and from the record of civic usefulness that has marked his career since his return.

But when he and O. Henry met at Trujillo Mr. Jennings was still frankly a fugitive outlaw. He and his brother Frank had chartered a tramp steamer in Galveston, and the departure had been so sudden that they had not had time to exchange their dress suits and high hats for a less conspicuous outfit. Mr.