He was a strange, reserved man, deeply loved by his few friends, but hard to get at, and resentful of the intrusion of lion hunters. He had the tenderness and sentimentality of the Southern gentleman, combined with a secretiveness which puzzled the denizens of his Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Only a few facts about his life were known; that he had lived on a ranch in Texas, had been a drugstore clerk, had written for papers in New Orleans, had traveled in Central America, and was a widower and had a young daughter--that was all his best friends knew. There was a gap in his life, and no one ventured to question him. But several years after his death a biography was published, and the disclosure was made that America’s short story king had served three years and three months as a federal prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary. That was where he had begun his career as a story writer; that was where he had got his intimate knowledge of gentle grafters and chivalrous highwaymen; that was where he had acquired the pathos and the heart-break. It was characteristic of America that there should have been a great fuss over this disclosure. There was the daughter, and also a new wife, and these thought that the dreadful secret so long hidden should have stayed hidden. Likewise some editors and reviewers thought it. Here was a man who was assumed to belong to the ages, and here was a story more moving and more instructive than any volume O. Henry had published; but they wanted to bury it in his grave--because, forsooth, America is the land of respectability, and the deepest tragedies of the human soul are of no consequence compared with the desire of two ladies to escape humiliation in a matter for which neither was in any way to be blamed. It appears that O. Henry was a teller of a bank in Texas, the affairs of which were very loosely handled. Something over a thousand dollars was missing; somebody else got it, and O. Henry got the trouble. He was on his way to stand trial, when he fell into a panic; he could not face the ordeal, and ran away to Honduras. But then, learning that his wife was dying of tuberculosis, he could not stand that either, and came home. His wife died, and he went through his trial in a daze of shame, and went to prison, to witness that infinity of horrors which America heaps upon those who have threatened its property interests. While in Honduras “Bill” Porter--that was his real name--had made a strange acquaintance, Al Jennings, a train-bandit much wanted by Wells-Fargo detectives. The two men came back to America and fate brought them to the same penitentiary. Jennings has since reformed, and has given us the story of himself and his literary friend in a book called “Through the Shadows with O. Henry.” So we are privileged to see the raw material out of which the stories were made, and to watch the maker at his work.