Music Welcome to snoozecast. The podcast is designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is dedicated to Matt and brought to you by Snowbound Pilgrims. Tonight we'll read a short story by O Henry titled Snowman, published post-humously in 1917. Snuescast first read this story back in 2020. William's Sydney Porter, pen name O'Henry, is known for short stories with surprised twist endings. He used pseudonyms like O'Henry to hide the fact that he was for a time imprisoned for embezzlement. This particular story, set during the winter in Colorado, had to be left unfinished by the author at the end of his life. O'Henry asked a friend and fellow-writer to finish it him, after describing to him in detail the remainder of his vision for him. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your, it is something like a crucible in which the world melts into a white star million miles away. The man who can stand the test is a snowman, and this is his reading by Moses' Carvin Tablets of Stone. Night had fluttered a stable 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 tadding by Miss Wilkins Abless Spinster, beginning a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tadding 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 nay, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse. The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon, where its builder may have 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. With 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. Fan by the whizzing, norther, the household, lay it my disposal.

Fan by the whizzing, norther, the fine, dry snow, was sifted and bolted through the cracks and not holes of the logs. The cookroom, without a separating door, appended. And there I could see a short, sturdy, leisurely, and weather-beaten man, moving with professional churness about his red hot stove. His face was solid and unreadable, something like that of a great thinker, or of one who had no thoughts to conceal.

I thought his eyes 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 drafts. So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made hot toddies against the attacks of Boreus. We clinked glasses often. They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like a thousand prisms on a chandelier that I once heard at a border's dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boarding house in Grammar Cree Square. Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow, end of the sphinx, and of the stars. But they who believe that all things, from a without wine table to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have found a nocturn or symphony to express the isolation of that blot out world. The clink of glass and bottle, a course of the wind and the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the canyon below, and the crash of the cook's pots and pans, united in a fit melody, I thought. No less welcome was the sizzling of broiling ham in venison cutlet endorsed 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 democr democratically, as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were pitching or hurling the discus. I looked at him with some appraism and curiosity and much consolation. There was no profit to tell us when the drifting evil outside might cease to fall, and it is well, when snowbound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the cook's favourable consideration. But I could read neither favour nor disapproval in the face and manner of our pot wrestler. He was about five feet nine inches and 200 pounds of commonplace bullnect, pinked face, callus 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 amoeuability that he fancied were better consume. And then I let supper usurp his brief occupancy of my thoughts. Draw up George, said Ross. Let's all eat while the grubs hot. You fellows go on and chew. Answer the cook. I ate mine in the kitchen before sundown. Think it'll be a big snow, George asked the ranch man. George had turned to re-enter 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 might not, said George, and went back to his stove. After we had eaten, he came in and gathered the empty 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 levation. 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 rangeman threw tobacco on the clear table and set forth again the bottles and glasses, and I saw that I stood in a deep channel through the long flood of his discourse which 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 forward. It ain't somehow, it seems to me, soluborious. I can stand water and mud, and two inches below zero, and 110 in the shade, and medium-sized cyclones. But this here fuzzy white stuff naturally gets me all a loco. 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 raper on, and rides in on the night and runs across are all outfitted in a white silk evening

frock, waving an ostrich feather fan and munking with a posse 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. And by the flood of Ross's talk was drawn up into the clouds.

So it pleased me to fancy, and they're 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 Irmine-lined monster that now covered our little world, and knew he was right. Of all the curious, nicknacks, mysteries, puzzles, rat traps, and well-disguised blessings the gods chucked down to us from the Olympian peaks. The most disquiet and evil-bringing is the snow. By scientific analysis, it is absolute beauty and purity, so at the beginning we looked doubtfully at chemistry. It falls upon the world and low, we live in another. It hides in a night the old scars and familiar places with which we have grown heart sick or enamored. As quietly as we can. We hustle on our ropes and highest up on Prince Kemmler-Alzerman's horse.

Or in the reindeer slay 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 is obscured at the only world they knew. In the cities, the white fairy who sets the brains of her doops whirling by a wave of her hand 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 underfoot. It leaves us clawing and stumbling in place, and a fifth element whose evil outdoes its This strangeness and beauty, their nature, low-comedy and, 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 index-starity. 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 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 pains 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 antics under its touch, have indicted permanent melodies commemorative of its beauty. Still, to the saddest overcoded optimist it is a plague, a corroding plague that Pharaoh successfully sidesteped. It beneficently covers the weed fields, swelling the crop, and the flower trust gets us by the throat like a sudden Quincy. It spreads the tail of its white

curtle over the red seams of the rugged north, and the Alaskan short story is born. It shelters the mountain traveler burrowing from the icy air, and, melting tomorrow, drowns his brother in the valley below. At its worst, it is lock and key and crucible, and the wand of Sershi. When a corral's man, in lonely ranches, mountain cabins and forest huts, the snow makes apes and tigers of the heartiest. It turns the bosom of weaker ones to class, their tongues to infants rattles, their hearts to lawlessness and spleen. It is not all from the isolation. This no is not merely a blockator. It is a chemical test. It is a good man who can show a reaction that is not chiefly composed of potash and magnisia with traces of atom, nibbukinesar, 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 reminiscent O best buyers of best sellers? We drew the latch. An in stumbled Gerard, as he afterward named himself. But just then he was no more than a worm struggling for life.

Envelopeed. 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 the snow, overcoats, mufflers and waterproofs, and dragged forth a living thing with a van-dike beard and marvelous diamond rings. We put it through the approved curriculum of snow-roving, hot milk, and teaspooned fultoses of whiskey, working him up to a graduating class entitled to a diploma of three fingers of rye in half a glass full of hot. One of the ranch boys had already come from the quarters at Ross's bugle-like yell, and kicked the strangers staggering pony to some sheltered corral, where beasts were entertained. Let a paragraphic biography of Gerard Intervene.

He was an opera singer originally, we gathered, but adversity in the snow had made him non-compose focus. 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 Gerard 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 Gerard was Paris-born and loved the snow with the same passion that an orchid does. Mies-Raboul commented Gerard and took another three fingers. Complete cast iron 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 MAM wireless. One was that George considered our outburst against the snow, childish. The other was that George did not love strangers. In as much as Gerard was a Frenchman, I concluded I had the message wrong, so I queried the other. Bright eyes, you don't really mean strangers, do you? And over the wireless came three deathly psychic taps. Yes. Then I reflected that to George, all foreigners were probably strangers. I had once known another camp cook, who had thought Missyua's mill milley were Italian-given names. This cook used to marvel therefore at the posity of the names. I have said that snow is a test of men. For one day, two days, Gerard stood at the window, fleshurizing his fingernails and shrieking and moaning at the monotony. To me, Gerard was just about as imperable 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 and American writers to the Pharaoh dealer.

I shall go crazy in this abominable, miserable place,

Mr. Rards constant prediction.

Never knew Mark Twain to bore me before.

So Ross over and over.

He sat by the other window, hour after hour, a box of Pittsburgh Stogies of the length, strength, and odor of a Pittsburgh 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 stogie puffing furiously. This in time gave him a recurrent premonition of cramps, gastritis, smoker's collic, or or whatever it is they have in Pittsburgh after a two deep indulgence in graft scandals. To fend off the collic, Ross resorted time and again to old doctor Stills Amber, colored USA Colleague C Result. After 48 hours, nerves. Positive fact I never knew Mark Twain to make me tired before. Positive fact, Ross slammed. When you snowbound, this way 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,

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