O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921

excitedly with a tall bowed man of fifty or so whose complexio

about you. Stopped at the hotel-you hadn't been there, they said. Port au Prince is a

t a pair of dull eyes behind a ragged moustac

e closely. "At least, I hope so. But where have you been? I was getting as a

before his mind like a moving-picture film; there were so many things

lodgings,

Bunsen chorused the word.

admitted. "I don't even know the name of my hos

e exclaimed. "Madame

But Simpson had

mamaloi-high prie

is own inconsequence. It was his instinct to defend any one who was

s. It's her company that's unsavoury. Especi

that he could kindle so; until that moment he had seemed but half alive. When he spoke his words came hurriedly-were almost

d the woman as common or unclean? If she is a heathen priestess, yet she worships a god of some sort. Do you?" He stopped suddenly;

ee him smiling, and he was smiling. Witherbee, who had no emotions of any sort, pulled his

o convert the whol

beginning in the

e-preserve, you mean,"

preserve, then!" S

," was all Bunsen said to that. "You may

Witherbee did not speak; Simpson, still raging, left him, str

disciplining of the soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned certain views of his, saying; "There's more education-soul education, if you will have it-in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that-more appalling because he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself had been too eager to find his work in life-his pre-ordained work-ever to

es where the Puritan shell has grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal ferment which sometimes bursts shell and man and all into disastrous fragments. Until old age kills them, the passions and emotions never die in man;

himself and Witherbee the pier was deserted; behind him the filthy town slept in its filth. Four buzzards wheeled above it, gorged and slow; the harbour lay before him like a green mirror, so still that the ship was reflected in it down to the last rope-yarn. Over all, the sun, colourless and furnace-hot, burned in a sky

Hayti?" asked Witherbe

he yielded perforce to its persuasion and swung around, facing him. Suddenly, because he was measuring himself against man and not against Nature, his wea

itherbee answere

the nati

a lot of them, you see, and there's almost

y li

o anything you have it in mind to do-the Haytian negro

ildren,

'd hate to have them f

hy

ve gone back. They've been going back for a hundred years. The West Coast-I've been there-is not so bad as Hayti. It's never been anything else than what it is now, you see, and if i

hat do you mean by Wes

." Witherbee lit the c

Simpson's voice. His distrust of the Roman Church had been ag

It's been unfortunate in its instr

er An

toine. You

A brute, and

ful of smoke drift into the motion

at

pleasant for you. He may try to

ossi

No wonder-it's not really worth living. But you

am I

from force of habit he dropped his voice. "The mamaloi has more power than the Church." He straightened and looked out toward t

one before the cripple's bo