SHORT STORY BY O’HENRY The Head-hunter Đây là một serries truyện ngắn anh ngữ nổi tiếng với những từ vựng quen thuộc. Nhằm giúp các em và các bạn yêu thich tiếng anh luyện tập và củng cố thêm kỹ năng đọc tiếng anh | SHORT STORY BY O HENRY The Head-hunter When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over I went to the Philippine Islands. There I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred- word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news. So I resigned and came home. On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war interested me not I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon us out of an unguessable past. Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim flinty relentless little men never seen but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests across perilous mountain-tops adown bottomless chasms into uninhabitable jungles always near with the invisible hand of death uplifted betraying their pursuit only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make-a twig crackling in the awful sweat-soaked night a drench of dew showering from the screening foliage of a giant tree a whisper at even from the rushes of a water-level-a hint of death for every mile and every hour-they amused me greatly those little fellows of one idea. When you think of it their method is beautifully and almost hilariously effective and simple. You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that was decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a basket made of green withes plaited. From time to time as vanity or ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you you creep forth with
