Dick Boyle's Business Card

"Dick Boyle's Business Card" is a short story by Bret Harte, an author known for his depictions of life in the American West. The narrative centers around a humorous and satirical exploration of social status and identity through the lens of a business card that represents the ambitions and pretensions of its titular character, Dick Boyle. Set against the backdrop of a mining town, the story highlights the clash between appearances and reality, showcasing Harte's trademark wit and keen observations of human nature. With its clever commentary on commerce and social interaction, the tale reflects the broader themes of aspiration and self-presentation in the rapidly changing landscape of 19th-century America.

• Short story

								
The Sage Wood and Dead Flat stage coach was waiting before the station.
The Pine Barrens mail wagon that connected with it was long overdue,
with its transfer passengers, and the station had relapsed into listless
expectation. Even the humors of Dick Boyle, the Chicago "drummer,"--and,
so far, the solitary passenger--which had diverted the waiting loungers,
began to fail in effect, though the cheerfulness of the humorist was
unabated. The ostlers had slunk back into the stables, the station
keeper and stage driver had reduced their conversation to impatient
monosyllables, as if each thought the other responsible for the delay.
A solitary Indian, wrapped in a commissary blanket and covered by a
cast-off tall hat, crouched against the wall of the station looking
stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building
containing its entire accommodation for man and beast under one
monotonous, shed-like roof, offered nothing to attract the eye. Still
less the prospect, on the one side two miles of arid waste to the
stunted, far-spaced pines in the distance, known as the "Barrens;" on
the other an apparently limitless level with darker patches of sage
brush, like the scars of burnt-out fires.

Dick Boyle approached the motionless Indian as a possible relief. "YOU
don't seem to care much if school keeps or not, do you, Lo?"

The Indian, who had been half crouching on his upturned soles, here
straightened himself with a lithe, animal-like movement, and stood up.
Boyle took hold of a corner of his blanket and examined it critically.

"Gov'ment ain't pampering you with A1 goods, Lo! I reckon the agent
charged 'em four dollars for that. Our firm could have delivered them to
you for 2 dols. 37 cents, and thrown in a box of beads in the bargain.
Suthin like this!" He took from his pocket a small box containing a
gaudy bead necklace and held it up before the Indian.

The savage, who had regarded him--or rather looked beyond him--with
the tolerating indifference of one interrupted by a frisking inferior
animal, here suddenly changed his expression. A look of childish
eagerness came into his gloomy face; he reached out his hand for the
trinket.

"Hol' on!" said Boyle, hesitating for a moment; then he suddenly
ejaculated, "Well! take it, and one o' these," and drew a business card
from his pocket, which he stuck in the band of the battered tall hat
of the aborigine. "There! show that to your friends, and when you're
wantin' anything in our line"--

The interrupting roar of laughter, coming from the box seat of the
coach, was probably what Boyle was expecting, for he turned away
demurely and walked towards the coach. "All right, boys! I've squared
the noble red man, and the star of empire is taking its westward way.
And I reckon our firm will do the 'Great Father' business for him at
about half the price that it is done in Washington."

But at this point the ostlers came hurrying out of the stables. "She's
comin'," said one. "That's her dust just behind the Lone Pine--and by
the way she's racin' I reckon she's comin' in mighty light."

"That's so," said the mail agent, standing up on the box seat for a
better view, "but darned ef I kin see any outside passengers. I reckon
we haven't waited for much."

Indeed, as the galloping horses of the incoming vehicle pulled out of
the hanging dust in the distance, the solitary driver could be seen
urging on his team. In a few moments more they had halted at the lower
end of the station.

"Wonder what's up!" said the mail agent.

"Nothin'! Only a big Injin scare at Pine Barrens," said one of the
ostlers. "Injins doin' ghost dancin'--or suthin like that--and the
passengers just skunked out and went on by the other line. Thar's only
one ez dar come--and she's a lady."

"A lady?" echoed Boyle.

"Yes," answered the driver, taking a deliberate survey of a tall,
graceful girl who, waiving the gallant assistance of the station keeper,
had leaped unaided from the vehicle. "A lady--and the fort commandant's
darter at that! She's clar grit, you bet--a chip o' the old block. And
all this means, sonny, that you're to give up that box seat to HER. Miss
Julia Cantire don't take anythin' less when I'm around."

The young lady was already walking, directly and composedly, towards
the waiting coach--erect, self-contained, well gloved and booted, and
clothed, even in her dust cloak and cape of plain ashen merino, with
the unmistakable panoply of taste and superiority. A good-sized aquiline
nose, which made her handsome mouth look smaller; gray eyes, with
an occasional humid yellow sparkle in their depths; brown penciled
eyebrows, and brown tendrils of hair, all seemed to Boyle to be
charmingly framed in by the silver gray veil twisted around her neck
and under her oval chin. In her sober tints she appeared to him to have
evoked a harmony even out of the dreadful dust around them. What HE
appeared to her was not so plain; she looked him over--he was rather
short; through him--he was easily penetrable; and then her eyes rested
with a frank recognition on the driver.

"Good-morning, Mr. Foster," she said, with a smile.

"Mornin', miss. I hear they're havin' an Injin scare over at the
Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein' stumped by a
lady!"

"I don't think they believed I would go, and some of them had their
wives with them," returned the young lady indifferently; "besides,
they are Eastern people, who don't know Indians as well as WE do, Mr.
Foster."

The driver blushed with pleasure at the association. "Yes, ma'am," he
laughed, "I reckon the sight of even old 'Fleas in the Blanket' over
there," pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the
station, "would frighten 'em out o' their boots. And yet he's got inside
his hat the business card o' this gentleman--Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling
for the big firm o' Fletcher & Co. of Chicago"--he interpolated, rising
suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; "so it sorter
looks ez ef any SKELPIN' was to be done it might be the other way round,
ha! ha!"

Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool
abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags
and a quantity of luggage--evidently belonging to the evading
passengers--were quickly transferred to the coach. But for his fair
companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his
conviction that his vehicle was used as a "d----d baggage truck," but
he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip. The
coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and
made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance. Some of that dust for
a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track,
but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar
halting trot. Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had

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