“Trust that burst” O. Henry in summary
Once the heroes of the cycle “Noble crook” Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, who, according to Peters, “each dollar in the hand of another… perceived as a personal insult, if he could not perceive it as a prey,” returned from Mexico after another successful scam and stopped in a Texas settlement called the Bird City, which stretches along the banks of the Rio Grande.
Rains begin, and all the male population of the town starts to cruise along a triangle between three local saloons. During a small gap, friends go for a walk and notice that the old dam is about to collapse under the pressure of water and the town will turn into an island. Andy Tucker has a brilliant idea. Without wasting time, they acquire all three saloons. Rains begin again, the dam breaks out, and the town is cut off from the outside world for some time. Residents of the town again begin to reach for the saloons, but they are in for a surprise. Two of them are closed, and only the “Blue
Everything goes like clockwork, but Andy Tucker can not deny himself the pleasure of treating himself to alcohol. He warns Jeff Peters that being drunk is extremely eloquent and tries to show it in practice. But Peters does not like it, and he asks a friend to retire and look for listeners somewhere else.
Andy leaves and starts speaking at the nearest intersection. There is a large crowd that is going somewhere behind the speaker. Time passes, but nobody appears in the bar. In the evening, two Mexicans deliver the “Blue Snake” to the drunk Tucker, who is unable to explain what happened. Sending a friend to sleep and closing the cashier, Peters goes to find out why the local population has lost interest in alcohol. It turns out that his friend Tucker, in a fit of drunken eloquence, delivered a two-hour speech, which the inhabitants of the Bird City did not hear in their lives. He spoke about the dangers of drunkenness so convincingly that in the end his listeners signed a paper where they solemnly promised not to take a drop of alcohol in their mouth during the year.
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