regret"--Tennyson, _The Princess_, Part IV, Song:
"Deep as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more."
One must wonder whether O. Henry remembered these
lines because of the untimely death of his young
first wife Athol, whom he loved dearly.]

"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 [15] and Miss Willella Learight. I don't mind telling you.

[FOOTNOTE 15: canada--(Spanish) a sheep camp or ranch]

"I was punching then for old Bill Toomey, on the San Miguel [16]. 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 [17].

[FOOTNOTE 16: San Miguel Creek flows into the Frio south of San
Antonio near the ranches where O. Henry lived in
his youth.]

[FOOTNOTE 17: The Nueces River is one of the major rivers of