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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Thet's so," continued Tennessee's Partner. "It ain't for me to say anything agin' him. And now, what's the case? Here's Tennessee wants money, wants it bad, and doesn't like to ask it of his old pardner. Well, what does Tennessee do? He lays for a stranger, and he fetches that stranger; and you lays for him, and you fetches him; and the honors is easy.
"I come yar as Tennessee's pardner knowing him nigh on four year, off and on, wet and dry, in luck and out o' luck. His ways ain't allers my ways, but thar ain't any p'ints in that young man, thar ain't any liveliness as he's been up to, as I don't know.
Nevertheless, when there was a tap at the door, and it was said that Tennessee's Partner was there on behalf of the prisoner, he was admitted at once without question. Perhaps the younger members of the jury, to whom the proceedings were becoming irksomely thoughtful, hailed him as a relief. For he was not, certainly, an imposing figure.
When one reflects on the fact that the exposure to the life depicted had occurred more than ten years before, from very brief experience, the wonder is incomprehensibly great. Nothing less than genius can account for such a result. "Tennessee's Partner," "M'liss," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and dozens more of these stories that became classics followed.
One night, when the pines beside the cabin were swaying in the storm, and trailing their slender fingers over the roof, and the roar and rush of the swollen river were heard below, Tennessee's Partner lifted his head from the pillow, saying, "It is time to go for Tennessee; I must put 'Jinny' in the cart"; and would have risen from his bed but for the restraint of his attendant.
Till his death in 1902 he wrote on, frequently recurring to the claim where he first "got the color," but never equaling his work during the year and a half that he was editor of the Overland. In 1866 Harte heard, from one who had been present, the incident that inspired "Tennessee's Partner." Eleven years before, at Second Garrote, a newcomer had committed a capital crime.
The cart was halted before the enclosure; and rejecting the offers of assistance with the same air of simple self-reliance he had displayed throughout, Tennessee's Partner lifted the rough coffin on his back and deposited it, unaided, within the shallow grave.
Two days of one of Kilpatrick's swift, silent marches would carry his hard-riding troopers around Hood's right flank, and into the streets of Macon, where a half hour's work with the torch on the bridges across the Ocmulgee and the creeks that enter it at that point, would have cut all of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee's communications.
He then introduced the unfortunate man, whose name happened to be really Clifford, as "Jay-bird Charley" an unhallowed inspiration of the moment that clung to him ever after. But to return to Tennessee's Partner, whom we never knew by any other than this relative title; that he had ever existed as a separate and distinct individuality we only learned later.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: "The White Old Maid." BRET HARTE: "Tennessee's Pardner." ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "Markheim." RUDYARD KIPLING: "Without Benefit of Clergy." KENNETH GRAHAME: "The Roman Road." F. J. STIMSON: "Mrs. Knollys." GUY DE MAUPASSANT: "The Necklace." ALPHONSE DAUDET: "The Last Class." H. C. BUNNER: "A Sisterly Scheme." O. HENRY: "A Municipal Report."
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