Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four MillionHenry, O.
Philosophy
Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million
Henry, O.
New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy’s Gentlemen of
the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.
The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue’s rush hour swept him away from the
company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts
filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky
deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes
confused his vision.
The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier’s first impulse
was to lie down and grab a root. And then he remembered that the
disturbance was human, and not elemental; and he backed out of it with
a grin into a doorway.
The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed hats the West
was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven sharpen their
eyes! The suit of black diagonal, wrinkled in impossible places; the
bright blue four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-down collar,
pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed as the letters
on the window of the open-day-and-night-except-Sunday restaurants; the
out-curve at the knees from the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of the
half-closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the
circling lasso; the deeply absorbed weather tan that the hottest sun of
Cape May can never equal; the seldom-winking blue eyes that
unconsciously divided the rushing crowds into fours, as though they
were being counted out of a corral; the segregated loneliness and
solemnity of expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons have
not intruded upon him nearer than a day’s ride—these brands of the West
were set upon Greenbrier Nye. Oh, yes; he wore a broad-brimmed hat,
gentle reader—just like those the Madison Square Post Office mail
carriers wear when they go up to Bronx Park on Sunday afternoons.
Suddenly Greenbrier Nye jumped into the drifting herd of metropolitan
cattle, seized upon a man, dragged him out of the stream and gave him a
buffet upon his collar-bone that sent him reeling against a wall.
The victim recovered his hat, with the angry look of a New Yorker who
has suffered an outrage and intends to write to the Trib. about it. But
he looked at his assailant, and knew that the blow was in consideration
of love and affection after the manner of the West, which greets its
friends with contumely and uproar and pounding fists, and receives its
enemies in decorum and order, such as the judicious placing of the
welcoming bullet demands.
“God in the mountains!” cried Greenbrier, holding fast to the foreleg
of his cull. “Can this be Longhorn Merritt?”
The other man was—oh, look on Broadway any day for the pattern—business
man—latest rolled-brim derby—good barber, business, digestion and
tailor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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