O. Henry
The Pimienta Pancakes
While we were rounding up a bunch of the Triangle-O cattle in the Frio bottoms
a projecting branch of a dead mesquite caught my wooden stirrup and gave my ankle
a wrench that laid me up in camp for a week.
On the third day of my compulsory idleness I crawled out near the grub wagon,
and reclined helpless under the conversational fire of Judson Odom, the camp cook.
Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set
in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of
an audience.
Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud's obmutescence.
Betimes I was stirred by invalid longings for something to eat that did not
come under the caption of "grub." I had visions of the maternal pantry "deep as
first love, and wild with all regret," and then I asked:
"Jud, can you make pancakes?"
Jud laid down his six-shooter, with which he was preparing to pound an
antelope steak, and stood over me in what I felt to be a menacing attitude. He
further endorsed my impression that his pose was resentful by fixing upon me with
his light blue eyes a look of cold suspicion.
"Say, you," he said, with candid, though not excessive, choler, "did you mean
that straight, or was you trying to throw the gaff into me? Some of the boys been
telling you about me and that pancake racket?"
"No, Jud," I said, sincerely, "I meant it. It seems to me I'd swap my pony and
saddle for a stack of buttered brown pancakes with some first crop, open kettle,
New Orleans sweetening. Was there a story about pancakes?"
Jud was mollified at once when he saw that I had not been dealing in
allusions. He brought some mysterious bags and tin boxes from the grub wagon and
set them in the shade of the hackberry where I lay reclined. I watched him as he
began to arrange them leisurely and untie their many strings.
"No, not a story," said Jud, as he worked, "but just the logical disclosures
in the case of me and that pink-eyed snoozer from Mired Mule Canada and Miss
Willella Learight. I don't mind telling you.
"I was punching then for old Bill Toomey, on the San Miguel. One day I gets
all ensnared up in aspirations for to eat some canned grub that hasn't ever mooed
or baaed or grunted or been in peck measures. So, I gets on my bronc and pushes
the wind for Uncle Emsley Telfair's store at the Pimienta Crossing on the Nueces.
"About three in the afternoon I throwed my bridle rein over a mesquite limb
and walked the last twenty yards into Uncle Emsley's store. I got up on the
counter and told Uncle Emsley that the signs pointed to the devastation of the
fruit crop of the world. In a minute I had a bag of crackers and a long-handled
spoon, with an open can each of apricots and pineapples and cherries and
greengages beside of me with Uncle Emsley busy chopping away with the hatchet at
the yellow clings. I was feeling like Adam before the apple stampede, and was
digging my spurs into the side of the counter and working with my twenty-four-inch
spoon when I happened to look out of the window into the yard of Uncle Emsley's
house, which was next to the store.
"There was a girl standing there - an imported girl with fixings on -
philandering with a croquet maul and amusing herself by watching my style of
encouraging the fruit canning industry.
"I slid off the counter and delivered up my shovel to Uncle Emsley.
"'That's my niece,' says he; 'Miss Willella Learight, down from Palestine on a
visit. Do you want that I should make you acquainted?'
"'The Holy Land,' I says to myself, my thoughts milling some as I tried to run
'em into the corral. 'Why not? There was sure angels in Pales - Why, yes, Uncle
Emsley,' I says out loud, 'I'd be awful edified to meet Miss Learight.'
"So Uncle Emsley took me out in the yard and gave us each other's
entitlements.
"I never was shy about women. I never could understand why some men who can
break a mustang before breakfast and shave in the dark, get all left-handed and
full of perspiration and excuses when they see a bold of calico draped around what
belongs to it. Inside of eight minutes me and Miss Willella was aggravating the
croquet balls around as amiable as second cousins. She gave me a dig about the
quantity of canned fruit I had eaten, and I got back at her, flat-footed, about
how a certain lady named Eve started the fruit trouble in the first free-grass
pasture - 'Over in Palestine, wasn't it?' says I, as easy and pat as roping a
one-year-old.
"That was how I acquired cordiality for the proximities of Miss Willella
Learight; and the disposition grew larger as time passed. She was stopping at
Pimienta Crossing for her health, which was very good, and for the climate, which
was forty per cent hotter than Palestine. I rode over to see her once every week
for a while; and then I figured it out that if I doubled the number of trips I
would see her twice as often.
"One week I slipped in a third trip; and that's where the pancakes and the
pink-eyed snoozer busted into the game.
"That evening, while I set on the counter with a peach and two damsons in my
mouth, I asked Uncle Emsley how Miss Willella was.
"'Why,' says Uncle Emsley, 'she's gone riding with Jackson Bird, the sheep man
from over at Mired Mule Canada.'
"I swallowed the peach seed and the two damson seeds. I guess somebody held
the counter by the bridle while I got off; and then I walked out straight ahead
till I butted against the mesquite where my roan was tied.
"'She's gone riding,' I whisper in my bronc's ear, 'with Birdstone Jack, the
hired mule from Sheep Man's Canada. Did you get that, old Leather-and-Gallops?'
"That bronc of mine wept, in his way. He'd been raised a cow pony and he
didn't care for snoozers.
"I went back and said to Uncle Emsley: 'Did you say a sheep man?'
"'I said a sheep man,' says Uncle Emsley again. 'You must have heard tell of
Jackson Bird. He's got eight sections of grazing and four thousand head of the
finest Merinos south of the Arctic Circle.'
"I went out and sat on the ground in the shade of the store and leaned against
a prickly pear. I sifted sand into my boots with unthinking hands while I
soliloquised a quantity about this bird with the Jackson plumage to his name.
"I never had believed in harming sheep men. I see one, one day, reading a
Latin grammar on hossback, and I never touched him! They never irritated me like
they do most cowmen. You wouldn't go to work now, and impair and disfigure
snoozers, would you, that eat on tables and wear little shoes and speak to you on
subjects? I had always let 'em pass, just as you would a jack-rabbit; with a
polite word and a guess about the weather, but no stopping to swap canteens. I
never thought it was worth while to be hostile with a snoozer. And because I'd
been lenient, and let 'em live, here was one going around riding with Miss
Willella Learight!
"An hour by sun they come loping back, and stopped at Uncle Emsley's gate. The
sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each other sentences all
sprightful and sagacious for a while. And then this feathered Jackson flies up in
his saddle and raises his little stewpot of a hat, and trots off in the direction
of his mutton ranch. By this time I had turned the sand out of my boots and
unpinned myself from the prickly pear; and by the time he gets half a mile out of
Pimienta, I singlefoots up beside him on my bronc.
"I said that snoozer was pink-eyed, but he wasn't. His seeing arrangement was
grey enough, but his eye-lashes was pink and his hair was sandy, and that gave you
the idea. Sheep man? - he wasn't more than a lamb man, anyhow - a little thing
with his neck involved in a yellow silk handkerchief, and shoes tied up in
bowknots.
"'Afternoon!' says I to him. 'You now ride with a equestrian who is commonly
called Dead-Moral-Certainty Judson, on account of the way I shoot. When I want a
stranger to know me I always introduce myself before the draw, for I never did
like to shake hands with ghosts.'
"'Ah,' says he, just like that - 'Ah, I'm glad to know you, Mr. Judson. I'm
Jackson Bird, from over at Mired Mule Ranch.'
"Just then one of my eyes saw a roadrunner skipping down the hill with a young
tarantula in his bill, and the other eye noticed a rabbit-hawk sitting on a dead
limb in a water-elm. I popped over one after the other with my forty-five, just to
show him. 'Two out of three,' says I. 'Birds just naturally seem to draw my fire
wherever I go.'
"'Nice shooting,' says the sheep man, without a flutter. 'But don't you
sometimes ever miss the third shot? Elegant fine rain that was last week for the
young grass, Mr. Judson?' says he.
"'Willie,' says I, riding over close to his palfrey, 'your infatuated parents
may have denounced you by the name of Jackson, but you sure moulted into a
twittering Willie - let us slough off this here analysis of rain and the elements,
and get down to talk that is outside the vocabulary of parrots. That is a bad
habit you have got of riding with young ladies over at Pimienta. I've known
birds,' says I, 'to be served on toast for less than that. Miss Willella,' says I,
'don't ever want any nest made out of sheep's wool by a tomtit of the Jacksonian
branch of ornithology. Now, are you going to quit, or do you wish for to gallop up
against this Dead-Moral-Certainty attachment to my name, which is good for two
hyphens and at least one set of funeral obsequies?'
"Jackson Bird flushed up some, and then he laughed.
"'Why, Mr. Judson,' says he, 'you've got the wrong idea. I've called on Miss
Learight a few times; but not for the purpose you imagine. My object is purely a
gastronomical one.'
"I reached for my gun.
"'Any coyote,' says I, 'that would boast of dishonourable - '
"'Wait a minute,' says this Bird, 'till I explain. What would I do with a
wife? If you ever saw that ranch of mine! I do my own cooking and mending.
Eating - that's all the pleasure I get out of sheep raising. Mr. Judson, did you
ever taste the pancakes that Miss Learight makes?'
"'Me? No,' I told him. 'I never was advised that she was up to any culinary
manoeuvres.'
"'They're golden sunshine,' says he, 'honey-browned by the ambrosial fires of
Epicurus. I'd give two years of my life to get the recipe for making them
pancakes. That's what I went to see Miss Learight for,' says Jackson Bird, 'but I
haven't been able to get it from her. It's an old recipe that's been in the family
for seventy-five years. They hand it down from one generation to another, but they
don't give it away to outsiders. If I could get that recipe, so I could make them
pancakes for myself on my ranch, I'd be a happy man,' says Bird.
"'Are you sure,' I says to him, 'that it ain't the hand that mixes the
pancakes that you're after?'
"'Sure,' says Jackson. 'Miss Learight is a mighty nice girl, but I can assure
you my intentions go no further than the gastro - ' but he seen my hand going down
to my holster and he changed his similitude - 'than the desire to procure a copy
of the pancake recipe,' he finishes.
"'You ain't such a bad little man,' says I, trying to be fair. 'I was thinking
some of making orphans of your sheep, but I'll let you fly away this time. But you
stick to pancakes,' says I, 'as close as the middle one of a stack; and don't go
and mistake sentiments for syrup, or there'll be singing at your ranch, and you
won't hear it.'
"'To convince you that I am sincere,' says the sheep man, 'I'll ask you to
help me. Miss Learight and you being closer friends, maybe she would do for you
what she wouldn't for me. If you will get me a copy of that pancake recipe, I give
you my word that I'll never call upon her again.'
"'That's fair,' I says, and I shook hands with Jackson Bird. 'I'll get it for
you if I can, and glad to oblige.' And he turned off down the big pear flat on the
Piedra, in the direction of Mired Mule; and I steered northwest for old Bill
Toomey's ranch.
"It was five days afterward when I got another chance to ride over to
Pimienta. Miss Willella and me passed a gratifying evening at Uncle Emsley's. She
sang some, and exasperated the piano quite a lot with quotations from the operas.
I gave imitations of a rattlesnake, and told her about Snaky McFee's new way of
skinning cows, and described the trip I made to Saint Louis once. We was getting
along in one another's estimations fine. Thinks I, if Jackson Bird can now be
persuaded to migrate, I win. I recollect his promise about the pancake receipt,
and I thinks I will persuade it from Miss Willella and give it to him; and then if
I catches Birdie off of Mired Mule again, I'll make him hop the twig.
"So, along about ten o'clock, I put on a wheedling smile and says to Miss
Willella: 'Now, if there's anything I do like better than the sight of a red steer
on green grass it's the taste of a nice hot pancake smothered in sugar-house
molasses.'
"Miss Willella gives a little jump on the piano stool, and looked at me
curious.
"'Yes,' says she, 'they're real nice. What did you say was the name of that
street in Saint Louis, Mr. Odom, where you lost your hat?'
"'Pancake Avenue,' says I, with a wink, to show her that I was on about the
family receipt, and couldn't be side-corralled off of the subject. 'Come, now,
Miss Willella,' I says; 'let's hear how you make 'em. Pancakes is just whirling in
my head like wagon wheels. Start her off, now - pound of flour, eight dozen eggs,
and so on. How does the catalogue of constituents run?'
"'Excuse me for a moment, please,' says Miss Willella, and she gives me a
quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool. She ambled out into the
other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his shirt sleeves, with a
pitcher of water. He turns around to get a glass on the table, and I see a
forty-five in his hip pocket. 'Great post-holes!' thinks I, 'but here's a family
thinks a heap of cooking receipts, protecting it with firearms. I've known outfits
that wouldn't do that much by a family feud.'
"'Drink this here down,' says Uncle Emsley, handing me the glass of water.
'You've rid too far to-day, Jud, and got yourself over-excited. Try to think about
something else now.'
"'Do you know how to make them pancakes, Uncle Emsley?' I asked.
"'Well, I'm not as apprised in the anatomy of them as some,' says Uncle
Emsley, 'but I reckon you take a sifter of plaster of Paris and a little dough and
saleratus and corn meal, and mix 'em with eggs and buttermilk as usual. Is old
Bill going to ship beeves to Kansas City again this spring, Jud?'
"That was all the pancake specifications I could get that night. I didn't
wonder that Jackson Bird found it uphill work. So I dropped the subject and talked
with Uncle Emsley for a while about hollow-horn and cyclones. And then Miss
Willella came and said 'Good-night,' and I hit the breeze for the ranch.
"About a week afterward I met Jackson Bird riding out of Pimienta as I rode
in, and we stopped on the road for a few frivolous remarks.
"'Got the bill of particulars for them flapjacks yet?' I asked him.
"'Well, no,' says Jackson. 'I don't seem to have any success in getting hold
of it. Did you try?'
"'I did,' says I, 'and 'twas like trying to dig a prairie dog out of his hole
with a peanut hull. That pancake receipt must be a jookalorum, the way they hold
on to it.'
"'I'm most ready to give it up,' says Jackson, so discouraged in his
pronunciations that I felt sorry for him; 'but I did want to know how to make them
pancakes to eat on my lonely ranch,' says he. 'I lie awake at nights thinking how
good they are.'
"'You keep on trying for it,' I tells him, 'and I'll do the same. One of us is
bound to get a rope over its horns before long. Well, so-long, Jacksy.'
"You see, by this time we were on the peacefullest of terms. When I saw that
he wasn't after Miss Willella, I had more endurable contemplations of that
sandy-haired snoozer. In order to help out the ambitions of his appetite I kept on
trying to get that receipt from Miss Willella. But every time I would say
'pancakes' she would get sort of remote and fidgety about the eye, and try to
change the subject. If I held her to it she would slide out and round up Uncle
Emsley with his pitcher of water and hip-pocket howitzer.
"One day I galloped over to the store with a fine bunch of blue verbenas that
I cut out of a herd of wild flowers over on Poisoned Dog Prairie. Uncle Emsley
looked at 'em with one eye shut and says:
"'Haven't ye heard the news?'
"'Cattle up?' I asks.
"'Willella and Jackson Bird was married in Palestine yesterday,' says he.
'Just got a letter this morning.'
"I dropped them flowers in a cracker-barrel, and let the news trickle in my
ears and down toward my upper left-hand shirt pocket until it got to my feet.
"'Would you mind saying that over again once more, Uncle Emsley?' says I.
'Maybe my hearing has got wrong, and you only said that prime heifers was 4.80 on
the hoof, or something like that.'
"'Married yesterday,' says Uncle Emsley, 'and gone to Waco and Niagara Falls
on a wedding tour. Why, didn't you see none of the signs all along? Jackson Bird
has been courting Willella ever since that day he took her out riding.'
"'Then,' says I, in a kind of yell, 'what was all this zizzaparoola he gives
me about pancakes? Tell me that.'
"When I said 'pancakes' Uncle Emsley sort of dodged and stepped back.
"'Somebody's been dealing me pancakes from the bottom of the deck,' I says,
'and I'll find out. I believe you know. Talk up,' says I, 'or we'll mix a panful
of batter right here.'
"I slid over the counter after Uncle Emsley. He grabbed at his gun, but it was
in a drawer, and he missed it two inches. I got him by the front of his shirt and
shoved him in a corner.
"'Talk pancakes,' says I, 'or be made into one. Does Miss Willella make 'em?'
"'She never made one in her life and I never saw one,' says Uncle Emsley,
soothing. 'Calm down now, Jud - calm down. You've got excited, and that wound in
your head is contaminating your sense of intelligence. Try not to think about
pancakes.'
"'Uncle Emsley,' says I, 'I'm not wounded in the head except so far as my
natural cognitive instincts run to runts. Jackson Bird told me he was calling on
Miss Willella for the purpose of finding out her system of producing pancakes, and
he asked me to help him get the bill of lading of the ingredients. I done so, with
the results as you see. Have I been sodded down with Johnson grass by a pink-eyed
snoozer, or what?'
"'Slack up your grip in my dress shirt,' says Uncle Emsley, 'and I'll tell
you. Yes, it looks like Jackson Bird has gone and humbugged you some. The day
after he went riding with Willella he came back and told me and her to watch out
for you whenever you got to talking about pancakes. He said you was in camp once
where they was cooking flapjacks, and one of the fellows cut you over the head
with a frying pan. Jackson said that whenever you got overhot or excited that
wound hurt you and made you kind of crazy, and you went raving about pancakes. He
told us to just get you worked off of the subject and soothed down, and you
wouldn't be dangerous. So, me and Willella done the best by you we knew how. Well,
well,' says Uncle Emsley, 'that Jackson Bird is sure a seldom kind of a snoozer.'"
During the progress of Jud's story he had been slowly but deftly combining
certain portions of the contents of his sacks and cans. Toward the close of it he
set before me the finished product - a pair of red-hot, rich-hued pancakes on a
tin plate. From some secret hoarding he also brought a lump of excellent butter
and a bottle of golden syrup.
"How long ago did these things happen?" I asked him.
"Three years," said Jud. "They're living on the Mired Mule Ranch now. But I
haven't seen either of 'em since. They say Jackson Bird was fixing his ranch up
fine with rocking chairs and window curtains all the time he was putting me up the
pancake tree. Oh, I got over it after a while. But the boys kept the racket up."
"Did you make these cakes by the famous recipe?" I asked.
"Didn't I tell you there wasn't no receipt?" said Jud. "The boys hollered
pancakes till they got pancake hungry, and I cut this recipe out of a newspaper.
How does the truck taste?"
"They're delicious," I answered. "Why don't you have some, too, Jud?"
I was sure I heard a sigh.
"Me?" said Jud. "I don't ever eat 'em."
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