EDITORIAL NOTE.--~Before the fatal illness of William Sydney Porter (known through his literary work as "O.Henry") this American master of short-story writing had begun for Hampton's Magazine the story printed below.Illness crept upon him rapidly and he was compelled to give up writing about at the point where the girl enters the story.
When he realized that he could do no more {it was his lifelong habit to write with a pencil, never dictating to a stenographer), O.Henry told in detail the remainder of The Snow Man to Harris Merton Lyon, whom he had often spoken of as one of the most effective short-story writers of the present time.Mr.Porter had delineated all of the characters, leaving only the rounding out of the plot in the final pages to Mr.Lyon.~Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow.To men, it is something like a crucible in which their world melts into a white star ten million miles away.
The man who can stand the test is a Snow Man; and this is his reading by Fahrenheit, Reaumur, or Moses's carven tablets of stone.
Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River, and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was deepening.The flakes were as large as an hour's circular tatting by Miss Wilkins's ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting could promise.I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would be welcome as a snow-bound pilgrim, both for hospitality's sake and because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.
The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon where its builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds;but I feared the drift.Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in the hills--the speaking tube of the four winds--came roaring the voice of the proprietor to the little room on the top floor.
At my "hello," a ranch hand came from an outer building and received my thankful horse.In another minute, Ross and I sat by a stove in the dining-room of the four-room ranch house, while the big, simple welcome of the household lay at my disposal.Fanned by the whizzing norther, the fine, dry snow was sifted and bolted through the cracks and knotholes of the logs.The cook room, without a separating door, appended.
In there I could see a short, sturdy, leisurely and weather-beaten man moving with professional sureness about his red-hot stove.
His face was stolid and unreadable--something like that of a great thinker, or of one who had no thoughts to conceal.I thought his eye seemed unwarrantably superior to the elements and to the man, but quickly attributed that to the characteristic self-importance of a petty chef."Camp cook" was the niche that I gave him in the Hall of Types; and he fitted it as an apple fits a dumpling.
Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the freezing draughts.So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks of Boreas.We clinked glasses often.They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a Louis XIV chandelier that I once heard at a boarder's dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boarding-house in Gramercy Square.~Sic transit.~Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars; but they who believe that all things, from a without-wine table d'hote to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have found a nocturne or a symphony to express the isolation of that blotted-out world.The clink of glass and bottle, the aeolian chorus of the wind in the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the canyon below, and the Wagnerian crash of the cook's pots and pans, united in a fit, discordant melody, I thought.No less welcome an accompaniment was the sizzling of broiling ham and venison cutlet indorsed by the solvent fumes of true Java, bringing rich promises of comfort to our yearning souls.
The cook brought the smoking supper to the table.He nodded to me democratically as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were pitching quoits or hurling the discus.I looked at him with some appraisement and curiosity and much conciliation.There was no prophet to tell us when that drifting evil outside might cease to fall; and it is well, when snow-bound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the cook's favorable consideration.But I could read neither favor nor disapproval in the face and manner of our pot-wrestler.
He was about five feet nine inches, and two hundred pounds of commonplace, bull-necked, pink-faced, callous calm.He wore brown duck trousers too tight and too short, and a blue flannel shirt with sleeves rolled above his elbows.There was a sort of grim, steady scowl on his features that looked to me as though he had fixed it there purposely as a protection against the weakness of an inherent amiability that, he fancied, were better concealed.And then I let supper usurp his brief occupancy of my thoughts.
"Draw up, George," said Ross."Let's all eat while the grub's hot.""You fellows go on and chew," answered the cook."I ate mine in the kitchen before sun-down.""Think it'll be a big snow, George?" asked the ranchman.
George had turned to reenter the cook room.He moved slowly around and, looking at his face, it seemed to me that he was turning over the wisdom and knowledge of centuries in his head.
"It might," was his delayed reply.
At the door of the kitchen he stopped and looked back at us.Both Ross and I held our knives and forks poised and gave him our regard.
Some men have the power of drawing the attention of others without speaking a word.Their attitude is more effective than a shout.
