Sixes and Sevens

Twenty-five stories give O. Henry's Sixes and Sevens its range of confidence games, reversals, city encounters, and comic misunderstandings. The collection moves between western settings and metropolitan life, allowing down-on-their-luck performers, amateur sleuths, lovers, impostors, and improbable professionals to occupy the same volume.

"The Last of the Troubadours" opens with Sam Galloway leaving Rancho Altito, guitar tied across his saddle and an entire household mourning his departure. Other titles signal different kinds of trouble: "Witches' Loaves," "Holding Up a Train," "The Duplicity of Hargraves," "The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes," and "The Diamond of Kali." Together they display O. Henry's preference for compressed situations whose apparent meaning changes late.

Surprise endings are part of the attraction, but the stories also depend on precise social observation. Speech, work, money, pride, and chance determine how characters misread one another. Humor can expose vanity or create sympathy for someone caught between performance and need. Readers can approach the book one tale at a time, following its shifts in place and mood without losing the author's recurring interest in how quickly status and expectation can be overturned.