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,
Réaumur, or Moses’s carven tablets of stone.
Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the cañon 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 cañon 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’hôte 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 cañon
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.
“And again it mightn’t,” said George, and went back to his stove.
After we had eaten, he came in and gathered the emptied dishes. He
stood for a moment, while his spurious frown deepened.
“It might stop any minute,” he said, “or it might keep up for days.”
At the farther end of the cook room I saw George pour hot water into
his dishpan, light his pipe, and put the tableware through its required
lavation. He then carefully unwrapped from a piece of old saddle
blanket a paperback book, and settled himself to read by his dim oil
lamp.
And then the ranchman threw tobacco on the cleared table and set forth
again the bottles and glasses; and I saw that I stood in a deep channel
through which the long dammed flood of his discourse would soon be
booming. But I was half content, comparing my fate with that of the
late Thomas Tucker, who had to sing for his supper, thus doubling the
burdens of both himself and his host.
“Snow is a hell of a thing,” said Ross, by way of a foreword. “It
ain’t, somehow, it seems to me, salubrious. I can stand water and mud
and two inches below zero and a hundred and ten in the shade and
medium-sized cyclones, but this here fuzzy white stuff naturally gets
me all locoed. I reckon the reason it rattles you is because it changes
the look of things so much. It’s like you had a wife and left her in
the morning with the same old blue cotton wrapper on, and rides in of a
night and runs across her all outfitted in a white silk evening frock,
waving an ostrich-feather fan, and monkeying with a posy of lily
flowers. Wouldn’t it make you look for your pocket compass? You’d be
liable to kiss her before you collected your presence of mind.”
By and by, the flood of Ross’s talk was drawn up into the clouds (so it
pleased me to fancy) and there condensed into the finer snowflakes of
thought; and we sat silent about the stove, as good friends and bitter
enemies will do. I thought of Ross’s preamble about the mysterious
influence upon man exerted by that ermine-lined monster that now
covered our little world, and knew he was right.
Of all the curious knickknacks, mysteries, puzzles, Indian gifts,
rat-traps, and well-disguised blessings that the gods chuck down to us
from the Olympian peaks, the most disquieting and evil-bringing is the
snow. By scientific analysis it is absolute beauty and purity—so, at
the beginning we look doubtfully at chemistry.
It falls upon the world, and lo! we live in another. It hides in a
night the old scars and familiar places with which we have grown
heart-sick or enamored. So, as quietly as we can, we hustle on our
embroidered robes and hie us on Prince Camaralzaman’s horse or in the
reindeer sleigh into the white country where the seven colors converge.
This is when our fancy can overcome the bane of it.
But in certain spots of the earth comes the snow-madness, made known by
people turned wild and distracted by the bewildering veil that has
obscured the only world they know. In the cities, the white fairy who
sets the brains of her dupes whirling by a wave of her wand is cast for
the comedy role. Her diamond shoe buckles glitter like frost; with a
pirouette she invites the spotless carnival.
But in the waste places the snow is sardonic. Sponging out the world of
the outliers, it gives no foothold on another sphere in return. It
makes of the earth a firmament under foot; it leaves us clawing and
stumbling in space in an inimical fifth element whose evil outdoes its
strangeness and beauty, There Nature, low comedienne, plays her tricks
on man. Though she has put him forth as her highest product, it appears
that she has fashioned him with what seems almost incredible
carelessness and indexterity. One-sided and without balance, with his
two halves unequally fashioned and joined, must he ever jog his
eccentric way. The snow falls, the darkness caps it, and the ridiculous
man-biped strays in accurate circles until he succumbs in the ruins of
his defective architecture.
In the throat of the thirsty the snow is vitriol. In appearance as
plausible as the breakfast food of the angels, it is as hot in the
mouth as ginger, increasing the pangs of the water-famished. It is a
derivative from water, air, and some cold, uncanny fire from which the
caloric has been extracted. Good has been said of it; even the poets,
crazed by its spell and shivering in their attics under its touch, have
indited permanent melodies commemorative of its beauty.
Still, to the saddest overcoated optimist it is a plague—a corroding
plague that Pharaoh successfully side-stepped. It beneficently covers
the wheat fields, swelling the crop—and the Flour Trust gets us by the
throat like a sudden quinsy. It spreads the tail of its white kirtle
over the red seams of the rugged north—and the Alaskan short story is
born. Etiolated perfidy, it shelters the mountain traveler burrowing
from the icy air—and, melting to-morrow, drowns his brother in the
valley below.
At its worst it is lock and key and crucible, and the wand of Circe.
When it corrals man in lonely ranches, mountain cabins, and forest
huts, the snow makes apes and tigers of the hardiest. It turns the
bosoms of weaker ones to glass, their tongues to infants’ rattles,
their hearts to lawlessness and spleen. It is not all from the
isolation; the snow is not merely a blockader; it is a Chemical Test.
It is a good man who can show a reaction that is not chiefly composed
of a drachm or two of potash and magnesia, with traces of Adam,
Ananias, Nebuchadnezzar, and the fretful porcupine.
This is no story, you say; well, let it begin.
There was a knock at the door (is the opening not full of context and
reminiscence oh, best buyers of best sellers?).
We drew the latch, and in stumbled Etienne Girod (as he afterward named
himself). But just then he was no more than a worm struggling for life,
enveloped in a killing white chrysalis.
We dug down through snow, overcoats, mufflers, and waterproofs, and
dragged forth a living thing with a Van Dyck beard and marvellous
diamond rings. We put it through the approved curriculum of
snow-rubbing, hot milk, and teaspoonful doses of whiskey, working him
up to a graduating class entitled to a diploma of three fingers of rye
in half a glassful of hot water. One of the ranch boys had already come
from the quarters at Ross’s bugle-like yell and kicked the stranger’s
staggering pony to some sheltered corral where beasts were entertained.
Let a paragraphic biography of Girod intervene.
Etienne was an opera singer originally, we gathered; but adversity and
the snow had made him _non compos vocis_. The adversity consisted of
the stranded San Salvador Opera Company, a period of hotel second-story
work, and then a career as a professional palmist, jumping from town to
town. For, like other professional palmists, every time he worked the
Heart Line too strongly he immediately moved along the Line of Least
Resistance. Though Etienne did not confide this to us, we surmised that
he had moved out into the dusk about twenty minutes ahead of a
constable, and had thus encountered the snow. In his most sacred blue
language he dilated upon the subject of snow; for Etienne was
Paris-born and loved the snow with the same passion that an orchid
does.
“Mee-ser-rhable!” commented Etienne, and took another three fingers.
“Complete, cast-iron, pussy-footed, blank... blank!” said Ross, and
followed suit.
“Rotten,” said I.
The cook said nothing. He stood in the door weighing our outburst; and
insistently from behind that frozen visage I got two messages (via the
M. A. M wireless). One was that George considered our vituperation
against the snow childish; the other was that George did not love
Dagoes. Inasmuch as Etienne was a Frenchman, I concluded I had the
message wrong. So I queried the other: “Bright eyes, you don’t really
mean Dagoes, do you?” and over the wireless came three deathly, psychic
taps: “Yes.” Then I reflected that to George all foreigners were
probably “Dagoes.” I had once known another camp cook who had thought
Mons., Sig., and Millie (Trans-Mississippi for Mlle.) were Italian
given names; this cook used to marvel therefore at the paucity of
Neo-Roman precognomens, and therefore why not—
I have said that snow is a test of men. For one day, two days, Etienne
stood at the window, Fletcherizing his finger nails and shrieking and
moaning at the monotony. To me, Etienne was just about as unbearable as
the snow; and so, seeking relief, I went out on the second day to look
at my horse, slipped on a stone, broke my collarbone, and thereafter
underwent not the snow test, but the test of flat-on-the-back. A test
that comes once too often for any man to stand.
However, I bore up cheerfully. I was now merely a spectator, and from
my couch in the big room I could lie and watch the human interplay with
that detached, impassive, impersonal feeling which French writers tell
us is so valuable to the litterateur, and American writers to the
faro-dealer.
“I shall go crazy in this abominable, mee-ser-rhable place!” was
Etienne’s constant prediction.
“Never knew Mark Twain to bore me before,” said Ross, over and over. He
sat by the other window, hour after hour, a box of Pittsburg stogies of
the length, strength, and odor of a Pittsburg graft scandal deposited
on one side of him, and “Roughing It,” “The Jumping Frog,” and “Life on
the Mississippi” on the other. For every chapter he lit a new stogy,
puffing furiously. This in time, gave him a recurrent premonition of
cramps, gastritis, smoker’s colic or whatever it is they have in
Pittsburg after a too deep indulgence in graft scandals. To fend off
the colic, Ross resorted time and again to Old Doctor Still’s
Amber-Colored U. S. A. Colic Cure. Result, after forty-eight
hours—nerves.
“Positive fact I never knew Mark Twain to make me tired before.
Positive fact.” Ross slammed “Roughing It” on the floor. “When you’re
snowbound this-away you want tragedy, I guess. Humor just seems to
bring out all your cussedness. You read a man’s poor, pitiful attempts
to be funny and it makes you so nervous you want to tear the book up,
get out your bandana, and have a good, long cry.”
At the other end of the room, the Frenchman took his finger nails out
of his mouth long enough to exclaim: “Humor! Humor at such a time as
thees! My God, I shall go crazy in thees abominable—”
“Supper,” announced George.
These meals were not the meals of Rabelais who said, “the great God
makes the planets and we make the platters neat.” By that time, the
ranch-house meals were not affairs of gusto; they were mental
distraction, not bodily provender. What they were to be later shall
never be forgotten by Ross or me or Etienne.
After supper, the stogies and finger nails began again. My shoulder
ached wretchedly, and with half-closed eyes I tried to forget it by
watching the deft movements of the stolid cook.
Suddenly I saw him cock his ear, like a dog. Then, with a swift step,
he moved to the door, threw it open, and stood there.
The rest of us had heard nothing.
“What is it, George?” asked Ross.
The cook reached out his hand into the darkness alongside the jamb.
With careful precision he prodded something. Then he made one careful
step into the snow. His back muscles bulged a little under the arms as
he stooped and lightly lifted a burden. Another step inside the door,
which he shut methodically behind him, and he dumped the burden at a
safe distance from the fire.
He stood up and fixed us with a solemn eye. None of us moved under that
Orphic suspense until,
“A woman,” remarked George.
Miss Willie Adams was her name. Vocation, school-teacher. Present
avocation, getting lost in the snow. Age, yum-yum (the Persian for
twenty). Take to the woods if you would describe Miss Adams. A willow
for grace; a hickory for fibre; a birch for the clear whiteness of her
skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons
for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the
leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as
ferns; her toe as small as a deer track. General impression upon the
dazed beholder—you could not see the forest for the trees.
Psychology, with a capital P and the foot of a lynx, at this juncture
stalks into the ranch house. Three men, a cook, a pretty young
woman—all snowbound. Count me out of it, as I did not count, anyway. I
never did, with women. Count the cook out, if you like. But note the
effect upon Ross and Etienne Girod.
Ross dumped Mark Twain in a trunk and locked the trunk. Also, he
discarded the Pittsburg scandals. Also, he shaved off a three days’
beard.
Etienne, being French, began on the beard first. He pomaded it, from a
little tube of grease Hongroise in his vest pocket. He combed it with a
little aluminum comb from the same vest pocket. He trimmed it with
manicure scissors from the same vest pocket. His light and Gallic
spirits underwent a sudden, miraculous change. He hummed a blithe San
Salvador Opera Company tune; he grinned, smirked, bowed, pirouetted,
twiddled, twaddled, twisted, and tooralooed. Gayly, the notorious
troubadour, could not have equalled Etienne.
Ross’s method of advance was brusque, domineering. “Little woman,” he
said, “you’re welcome here!”—and with what he thought subtle double
meaning—“welcome to stay here as long as you like, snow or no snow.”
Miss Adams thanked him a little wildly, some of the wintergreen berries
creeping into the birch bark. She looked around hurriedly as if seeking
escape. But there was none, save the kitchen and the room allotted her.
She made an excuse and disappeared into her own room.
Later I, feigning sleep, heard the following:
“Mees Adams, I was almost to perish-die-of monotony w’en your fair and
beautiful face appear in thees mee-ser-rhable house.” I opened my
starboard eye. The beard was being curled furiously around a finger,
the Svengali eye was rolling, the chair was being hunched closer to the
school-teacher’s. “I am French—you see—temperamental—nervous! I cannot
endure thees dull hours in thees ranch house; but—a woman comes! Ah!”
The shoulders gave nine ’rahs and a tiger. “What a difference! All is
light and gay; ever’ting smile w’en you smile. You have ’eart, beauty,
grace. My ’eart comes back to me w’en I feel your ’eart. So!” He laid
his hand upon his vest pocket. From this vantage point he suddenly
snatched at the school-teacher’s own hand, “Ah! Mees Adams, if I could
only tell you how I ad—”
“Dinner,” remarked George. He was standing just behind the Frenchman’s
ear. His eyes looked straight into the school-teacher’s eyes. After
thirty seconds of survey, his lips moved, deep in the flinty, frozen
maelstrom of his face: “Dinner,” he concluded, “will be ready in two
minutes.”
Miss Adams jumped to her feet, relieved. “I must get ready for dinner,”
she said brightly, and went into her room.
Ross came in fifteen minutes late. After the dishes had been cleaned
away, I waited until a propitious time when the room was temporarily
ours alone, and told him what had happened.
He became so excited that he lit a stogy without thinking.
“Yeller-hided, unwashed, palm-readin’ skunk,” he said under his breath.
“I’ll shoot him full o’ holes if he don’t watch out—talkin’ that way to
my wife!”
I gave a jump that set my collarbone back another week. “Your wife!” I
gasped.
“Well, I mean to make her that,” he announced.
The air in the ranch house the rest of that day was tense with pent-up
emotions, oh, best buyers of best sellers.
Ross watched Miss Adams as a hawk does a hen; he watched Etienne as a
hawk does a scarecrow, Etienne watched Miss Adams as a weasel does a
henhouse. He paid no attention to Ross.
The condition of Miss Adams, in the role of sought-after, was feverish.
Lately escaped from the agony and long torture of the white cold, where
for hours Nature had kept the little school-teacher’s vision locked in
and turned upon herself, nobody knows through what profound feminine
introspections she had gone. Now, suddenly cast among men, instead of
finding relief and security, she beheld herself plunged anew into other
discomforts. Even in her own room she could hear the loud voices of her
imposed suitors. “I’ll blow you full o’ holes!” shouted Ross.
“Witnesses,” shrieked Etienne, waving his hand at the cook and me. She
could not have known the previous harassed condition of the men,
fretting under indoor conditions. All she knew was, that where she had
expected the frank freemasonry of the West, she found the subtle tangle
of two men’s minds, bent upon exacting whatever romance there might be
in her situation.
She tried to dodge Ross and the Frenchman by spells of nursing me. They
also came over to help nurse. This combination aroused such a natural
state of invalid cussedness on my part that they were all forced to
retire. Once she did manage to whisper: “I am so worried here. I don’t
know what to do.”
To which I replied, gently, hitching up my shoulder, that I was a
hunch-savant and that the Eighth House under this sign, the Moon being
in Virgo, showed that everything would turn out all right.
But twenty minutes later I saw Etienne reading her palm and felt that
perhaps I might have to recast her horoscope, and try for a dark man
coming with a bundle.
Toward sunset, Etienne left the house for a few moments and Ross, who
had been sitting taciturn and morose, having unlocked Mark Twain, made
another dash. It was typical Ross talk.
He stood in front of her and looked down majestically at that cool and
perfect spot where Miss Adams’ forehead met the neat part in her
fragrant hair. First, however, he cast a desperate glance at me. I was
in a profound slumber.
“Little woman,” he began, “it’s certainly tough for a man like me to
see you bothered this way. You”—gulp—“you have been alone in this world
too long. You need a protector. I might say that at a time like this
you need a protector the worst kind—a protector who would take a
three-ring delight in smashing the saffron-colored kisser off of any
yeller-skinned skunk that made himself obnoxious to you. Hem. Hem. I am
a lonely man, Miss Adams. I have so far had to carry on my life without
the”—gulp—“sweet radiance”—gulp—“of a woman around the house. I feel
especially doggoned lonely at a time like this, when I am pretty near
locoed from havin’ to stall indoors, and hence it was with delight I
welcomed your first appearance in this here shack. Since then I have
been packed jam full of more different kinds of feelings, ornery, mean,
dizzy, and superb, than has fallen my way in years.”
Miss Adams made a useless movement toward escape. The Ross chin stuck
firm. “I don’t want to annoy you, Miss Adams, but, by heck, if it comes
to that you’ll have to be annoyed. And I’ll have to have my say. This
palm-ticklin’ slob of a Frenchman ought to be kicked off the place and
if you’ll say the word, off he goes. But I don’t want to do the wrong
thing. You’ve got to show a preference. I’m gettin’ around to the
point, Miss—Miss Willie, in my own brick fashion. I’ve stood about all
I can stand these last two days and somethin’s got to happen. The
suspense hereabouts is enough to hang a sheepherder. Miss Willie”—he
lassooed her hand by main force—“just say the word. You need somebody
to take your part all your life long. Will you mar—”
“Supper,” remarked George, tersely, from the kitchen door.
Miss Adams hurried away.
Ross turned angrily. “You—”
“I have been revolving it in my head,” said George.
He brought the coffee pot forward heavily. Then bravely the big platter
of pork and beans. Then somberly the potatoes. Then profoundly the
biscuits. “I have been revolving it in my mind. There ain’t no use
waitin’ any longer for Swengalley. Might as well eat now.”
From my excellent vantage-point on the couch I watched the progress of
that meal. Ross, muddled, glowering, disappointed; Etienne, eternally
blandishing, attentive, ogling; Miss Adams, nervous, picking at her
food, hesitant about answering questions, almost hysterical; now and
then the solid, flitting shadow of the cook, passing behind their backs
like a Dreadnaught in a fog.
I used to own a clock which gurgled in its throat three minutes before
it struck the hour. I know, therefore, the slow freight of
Anticipation. For I have awakened at three in the morning, heard the
clock gurgle, and waited those three minutes for the three strokes I
knew were to come. _Alors_. In Ross’s ranch house that night the slow
freight of Climax whistled in the distance.
Etienne began it after supper. Miss Adams had suddenly displayed a
lively interest in the kitchen layout and I could see her in there,
chatting brightly at George—not with him—the while he ducked his head
and rattled his pans.
“My fren’,” said Etienne, exhaling a large cloud from his cigarette and
patting Ross lightly on the shoulder with a bediamonded hand which,
hung limp from a yard or more of bony arm, “I see I mus’ be frank with
you. Firs’, because we are rivals; second, because you take these
matters so serious. I—I am Frenchman. I love the women”—he threw back
his curls, bared his yellow teeth, and blew an unsavory kiss toward the
kitchen. “It is, I suppose, a trait of my nation. All Frenchmen love
the women—pretty women. Now, look: Here I am!” He spread out his arms.
“Cold outside! I detes’ the col-l-l! Snow! I abominate the
mees-ser-rhable snow! Two men! This—” pointing to me—“an’ this!”
Pointing to’ Ross. “I am distracted! For two whole days I stan’ at the
window an’ tear my ’air! I am nervous, upset, pr-r-ro-foun’ly distress
inside my ’ead! An’ suddenly—be’old! A woman, a nice, pretty, charming,
innocen’ young woman! I, naturally, rejoice. I become myself again—gay,
light-’earted, ’appy. I address myself to mademoiselle; it passes the
time. That, m’sieu’, is wot the women are for—pass the time!
Entertainment—like the music, like the wine!
“They appeal to the mood, the caprice, the temperamen’. To play with
thees woman, follow her through her humor, pursue her—ah! that is the
mos’ delightful way to sen’ the hours about their business.”
Ross banged the table. “Shut up, you miserable yeller pup!” he roared.
“I object to your pursuin’ anything or anybody in my house. Now, you
listen to me, you—” He picked up the box of stogies and used it on the
table as an emphasizer. The noise of it awoke the attention of the girl
in the kitchen. Unheeded, she crept into the room. “I don’t know
anything about your French ways of lovemakin’ an’ I don’t care. In my
section of the country, it’s the best man wins. And I’m the best man
here, and don’t you forget it! This girl’s goin’ to be mine. There
ain’t going to be any playing, or philandering, or palm reading about
it. I’ve made up my mind I’ll have this girl, and that settles it. My
word is the law in this neck o’ the woods. She’s mine, and as soon as
she says she’s mine, you pull out.” The box made one final, tremendous
punctuation point.
Etienne’s bravado was unruffled. “Ah! that is no way to win a woman,”
he smiled, easily. “I make prophecy you will never win ’er that way.
No. Not thees woman. She mus’ be played along an’ then keessed, this
charming, delicious little creature. One kees! An’ then you ’ave her.”
Again he displayed his unpleasant teeth. “I make you a bet I will kees
her—”
As a cheerful chronicler of deeds done well, it joys me to relate that
the hand which fell upon Etienne’s amorous lips was not his own. There
was one sudden sound, as of a mule kicking a lath fence, and
then—through the swinging doors of oblivion for Etienne.
I had seen this blow delivered. It was an aloof, unstudied, almost
absent-minded affair. I had thought the cook was rehearsing the proper
method of turning a flapjack.
Silently, lost in thought, he stood there scratching his head. Then he
began rolling down his sleeves.
“You’d better get your things on, Miss, and we’ll get out of here,” he
decided. “Wrap up warm.”
I heard her heave a little sigh of relief as she went to get her cloak,
sweater, and hat.
Ross jumped to his feet, and said: “George, what are you goin’ to do?”
George, who had been headed in my direction, slowly swivelled around
and faced his employer. “Bein’ a camp cook, I ain’t over-burdened with
hosses,” George enlightened us. “Therefore, I am going to try to borrow
this feller’s here.”
For the first time in four days my soul gave a genuine cheer. “If it’s
for Lochinvar purposes, go as far as you like,” I said, grandly.
The cook studied me a moment, as if trying to find an insult in my
words. “No,” he replied. “It’s for mine and the young lady’s purposes,
and we’ll go only three miles—to Hicksville. Now let me tell you
somethin’, Ross.” Suddenly I was confronted with the cook’s chunky back
and I heard a low, curt, carrying voice shoot through the room at my
host. George had wheeled just as Ross started to speak. “You’re nutty.
That’s what’s the matter with you. You can’t stand the snow. You’re
getting nervouser, and nuttier every day. That and this Dago”—he jerked
a thumb at the half-dead Frenchman in the corner—“has got you to the
point where I thought I better horn in. I got to revolving it around in
my mind and I seen if somethin’ wasn’t done, and done soon, there’d be
murder around here and maybe”—his head gave an imperceptible list
toward the girl’s room—“worse.”
He stopped, but he held up a stubby finger to keep any one else from
speaking. Then he plowed slowly through the drift of his ideas. “About
this here woman. I know you, Ross, and I know what you reely think
about women. If she hadn’t happened in here durin’ this here snow,
you’d never have given two thoughts to the whole woman question.
Likewise, when the storm clears, and you and the boys go hustlin’ out,
this here whole business ’ll clear out of your head and you won’t think
of a skirt again until Kingdom Come. Just because o’ this snow here,
don’t forget you’re living in the selfsame world you was in four days
ago. And you’re the same man, too. Now, what’s the use o’ getting all
snarled up over four days of stickin’ in the house? That there’s what I
been revolvin’ in my mind and this here’s the decision I’ve come to.”
He plodded to the door and shouted to one of the ranch hands to saddle
my horse.
Ross lit a stogy and stood thoughtful in the middle of the room. Then
he began: “I’ve a durn good notion, George, to knock your confounded
head off and throw you into that snowbank, if—”
“You’re wrong, mister. That ain’t a durned good notion you’ve got. It’s
durned bad. Look here!” He pointed steadily out of doors until we were
both forced to follow his finger. “You’re in here for more’n a week
yet.” After allowing this fact to sink in, he barked out at Ross: “Can
you cook?” Then at me: “Can you cook?” Then he looked at the wreck of
Etienne and sniffed.
There was an embarrassing silence as Ross and I thought solemnly of a
foodless week.
“If you just use hoss sense,” concluded George, “and don’t go for to
hurt my feelin’s, all I want to do is to take this young gal down to
Hicksville; and then I’ll head back here and cook fer you.”
The horse and Miss Adams arrived simultaneously, both of them very
serious and quiet. The horse because he knew what he had before him in
that weather; the girl because of what she had left behind.
Then all at once I awoke to a realization of what the cook was doing.
“My God, man!” I cried, “aren’t you afraid to go out in that snow?”
Behind my back I heard Ross mutter, “Not him.”
George lifted the girl daintily up behind the saddle, drew on his
gloves, put his foot in the stirrup, and turned to inspect me
leisurely.
As I passed slowly in his review, I saw in my mind’s eye the algebraic
equation of Snow, the equals sign, and the answer in the man before me.
“Snow is my last name,” said George. He swung into the saddle and they
started cautiously out into the darkening swirl of fresh new currency
just issuing from the Snowdrop Mint. The girl, to keep her place, clung
happily to the sturdy figure of the camp cook.
I brought three things away from Ross Curtis’s ranch house—yes, four.
One was the appreciation of snow, which I have so humbly tried here to
render; (2) was a collarbone, of which I am extra careful; (3) was a
memory of what it is to eat very extremely bad food for a week; and (4)
was the cause of (3) a little note delivered at the end of the week and
hand-painted in blue pencil on a sheet of meat paper.
“I cannot come back there to that there job. Mrs. Snow say no, George.
I been revolvin’ it in my mind; considerin’ circumstances she’s right.”