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Updated: May 3, 2025
"Ah!" cried Dunbar, the tawny eyes glittering with excitement. "The tail of a scorpion! I thought so! And Sowerby would have it that it represented the stem of a Cactus or Prickly Pear!" "Not so bad a guess," replied Stuart. "There are resemblances not in the originals but in such a miniature reproduction as this. He was wrong, however. May I ask where you obtained the fragment?"
"The Cactus" and "The Red Roses of Tonia," however, rank only second to "O. Henry's" best dozen stories. The second part of the book is a miscellany of critical and biographical comment, including also some verse tributes to the story writer's memory and a valuable index to the collected edition of "O. Henry's" stories.
If he so much as brushed a flying tire against one of the millions of spikes clutching out, striking out from the cactus, there would be a shock, a splitting wave of air an end. Madeline thought she saw that Link's bulging cheek and jaw were gray, that his tight-shut lips were white, that the smile was gone. Then he really was human not a demon. She felt a strange sense of brotherhood.
And he is new, and awfully interesting even if he is only a station-agent." Wherefrom it will be perceived that her thoughts had veered from the cactus owl, to another perplexing local phenomenon. The glaring line of the railroad right-of-way rose before her feet, a discordant note of rigidity and order in the confused prodigality of desert growth.
And all this while the waggon jolted on over the rough ground or rolled smoothly over the flat plain, crushing down the thick buffalo-grass, or smashing some succulent, thorny cactus with a peculiar whishing sound that seemed to penetrate far through the silence of the night.
As I reached the border of the plantation I found between me and the road, which here entered the town, a cactus hedge about five feet high, with no passage through it except at a considerable distance to the right.
I felt myself shake and, with all of the iron will I could assert, I hid from her the sweetness of this thing that was my weakness and her strength. "I might lasso you from my horse, drag you through the cactus," I added with the implacability of an Apache. "Russ!" she cried. Something in this last ridiculous threat had found a vital mark.
The cactus and Spanish dagger, and the ever-present sage bush of the lower levels, had disappeared, crow's-foot and blue-joint grasses swung in the wind. The bright flame of the painted cup and the purple of the asters still lighted up the aisles of the pines in sheltered places. "There are many more in August," he explained. "The frost has swept them all away." "Is this our stream?" she asked.
There was room everywhere, nothing much, in fact, but room, with a little coarse grass and plenty of clear air. But the population went in for crowding by preference, and didn't care a cactus whether it was hygienic or not.
The return to Can Mallorquí was sad and silent. Pepet led the way, the bimbau between his lips buzzing like a gad-fly. From time to time he stopped to throw a stone at a bird or at a puffed-up black lizard darting among the opuntia cactus. Little impression did death make upon him!
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