Hackett rose as the procession halted before him, and after a little lecture upon matrimony, asked: 

“What are your names?”

“Sally and Charles,” answered the cook.

“Join hands, Charles and Sally.”

Perhaps there never was a stranger wedding.  For, wedding it was, though only two of those present knew it.  When the ceremony was over, the cow-punchers gave one yell of congratulation and immediately abandoned their foolery for the night.  Blankets were unrolled and sleep became the paramount question.

The cook (divested of his decorations) and the Marquis lingered for a moment in the shadow of the grub wagon.  The Marquis leaned her head against his shoulder.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she was saying.  “Father was gone, and we kids had to rustle.  I had helped him so much with the cattle that I thought I’d turn cowboy.  There wasn’t anything else I could make a living at.  I wasn’t much stuck on it though, after I got here, and I’d have left only—­”

“Only what?”

“You know.  Tell me something.  When did you first—­what made you—­”

“Oh, it was as soon as we struck the camp, when Saunders bawled out ’The Marquis and Miss Sally!’ I saw how rattled you got at the name, and I had my sus—­”

“Cheeky!” whispered the Marquis.  “And why should you think that I thought he was calling me ’Miss Sally’?”

“Because,” answered the cook, calmly, “I was the Marquis.  My father was the Marquis of Borodale.  But you’ll excuse that, won’t you, Sally?  It really isn’t my fault, you know.”

[Illustration:  “Here we have Kate and John.” (cartoon from The Rolling Stone)]

A FOG IN SANTONE

      [Published in The Cosmopolitan, October, 1912.  Probably
      written in 1904, or shortly after O. Henry’s first successes
      in New York.]

The drug clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the high-turned overcoat collar.

“I would rather not supply you,” he said doubtfully.  “I sold you a dozen morphine tablets less than an hour ago.”

The customer smiles wanly.  “The fault is in your crooked streets.  I didn’t intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up.  Excuse me.”

He draws his collar higher, and moves out, slowly.  He stops under an electric light at the corner, and juggles absorbedly with three or four little pasteboard boxes.  “Thirty-six,” he announces to himself.  “More than plenty.”  For a gray mist had swept upon Santone that night, an opaque terror that laid a hand to the throat of each of the city’s guests.  It was computed that three thousand invalids were hibernating in the town.  They had come from far and wide, for here, among these contracted river-sliced streets, the goddess Ozone has elected to linger.

Purest atmosphere, sir, on earth!  You might think from the river winding through our town that we are malarial, but, no, sir!  Repeated experiments made both by the Government and local experts show that our air contains nothing deleterious—­nothing but ozone, sir, pure ozone.  Litmus paper tests made all along the river show—­but you can read it all in the prospectuses; or the Santonian will recite it for you, word by word.