_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