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The
mustachioed young man from North Carolina hardly seemed the martial type, but
as a citizen soldier in the Austin Grays he demonstrated the qualities of a leader
– even if it was to keep from spending the night in the guardhouse.
In
the early summer of 1886, he and his fellow guardsmen boarded the train for Lampasas,
a city 70 miles northwest of Austin
then touted as the “Saratoga of the South.”
Since the arrival of the first
settlers in the 1850s, the springs along the aptly named Sulfur Creek had been
thought to have medicinal qualities. When the Santa Fe Railroad reached Lampasas
in 1882, developers sought to transform the town into a resort. Construction soon
started on a grand hotel and bathhouse.
The largest frame overnight accommodation
in the state, the two-story Park Hotel looked like a giant mansion. Wide galleries
lined each floor of the 331-foot long structure, which had 200 guest rooms, hot
and cold bathing pools, dressing rooms, concession facilities and a ball room
large enough to seat a full orchestra.
But the volunteers arriving at
the Lampasas depot had not come to town to take the waters. They had gathered
to sharpen their military skills at the annual encampment of the Texas Volunteer
Guard, the predecessor of today’s National Guard.
Though the Austin Grays
stood ready to defend their state, the company was something of a social group
as well. And few Austinites could be considered more convivial than Lt. Will Porter,
a Southern gentleman known for his bass singing voice, his sense of humor and
his taste for beer. In addition to their membership in the Grays, Porter and three
other guardsmen made up the Hill City Quartette, a well-known singing group.
The quartet received permission to go on leave one night to perform at a grand
ball at the equally-grand Park Hotel. Between sets, the sharply uniformed citizen
soldiers from Austin had no trouble finding attractive, interested dancing partners.
Tripping the light fantastic and perhaps enjoying too many cups of champagne punch,
the quartet lost track of time.
About five minutes after they were supposed
to be back in camp, someone finally noticed the time. By then, the officer of
the day at the nearby military tent city already had a squad en route to the hotel
to arrest the tardy guardsmen.
Thinking fast, Porter got a friend to
meet the squad at the door and suggest that since there were ladies present, the
soldiers should stack their rifles outside before entering.
The corporal
in charge agreed that it would not be proper to make the belles at the ball uncomfortable
and ordered his men to put down their weapons. As the soldiers walked into the
hotel, Porter and his comrades slipped out a side door and retrieved their artillery.
Porter
herded all the un-armed AWOL guardsmen into formation, and then marched them back
to camp as if they were under arrest.
As one of the participants later
recalled, “None of us knew the countersign, and our success in getting by the
sentry was a matter of pure grit. As we approached…we were crossing a narrow plank
bridge in single file, at the end of which the sentry threw up his gun and Porter
marched us right straight up to that gun until the front man was marking time
with the point of the gun right at his stomach.”
Staring down the sentry,
the lieutenant in charge barked: “Squad under arrest. “Stand aside!”
Once inside the camp, the impostors stacked their guns and quietly disappeared
into their tents. A short time later the embarrassed corporal and his unarmed
men returned without their prisoners. The sentry did not buy his story and had
the whole squad marched to the guardhouse.
“There was quite a time at
the [corporal’s] court-martial next morning,” Porter’s old guard buddy later recalled,
“but no one ever knew our connection to the story.”
One of Porter’s biographers
speculated that the tale might have been embellished a bit, but its teller had
declared: “This adventure is only one of thousands of such incidents that commonly
occurred in his life.”
Porter, under the penname of O. Henry, went on to
make a career out of adventure. His world-wide fame has endured, though the incident
at Lampasas is as long-forgotten as the old Park Hotel, destroyed by fire in 1895.
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