O. Henry

“ Always to the right Burrows bore, until in a little while he struck the old Indian trail that followed the Nueces southward, and that passed, twenty-eight miles to the southeast, through Lone Elm.
Here Burrows urged the sorrel into a steady lope. As he settled himself in the saddle for a long ride he heard the drumming of hoofs, the hollow “thwack” of chaparral against wooden stirrups, the whoop of a Comanche; and Wells Pearson burst out of the brush at the right of the trail like a precocious yellow chick from a dark green Easter egg. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the summit of this he paused to take his last general view of the landscape for, from now on, he must wind through brakes and thickets of chaparral, pear, and mesquite, for the most part seeing scarcely farther than twenty yards in any direction, choosing his way by the prairie-dweller’s instinct, guided only by an occasional glimpse of a far distant hilltop, a peculiarly shaped knot of trees, or the position of the sun.
Sam rode down the sloping hill and plunged into the great pear flat that lies between the Quintanilla and the Piedra. ”

“ In ten seconds the car is surrounded by 600 infuriated citizens, crying, ‘Lynch the motorman! Lynch the motorman!’ at the top of their voices. Some of them run to the nearest cigar store to get a rope; but they find the last one has just been cut up and labelled. Hundreds of the excited mob press close to the cowering motorman, whose hand is observed to tremble perceptibly as he transfers a stick of pepsin gum from his pocket to his mouth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not like oatmeal, and it is the one ambition of my life to die rich. I am of a cold and heartless disposition. I do not care for my fellowmen and I never give a cent to beggars or charity.
“Now, my dear doctor, that is the true description of myself, the man whom that shrewd detective was to hunt down. You who are familiar with the history of crime in New York of late should be able to foretell the result. When I promised you to exhibit to your incredulous gaze the sleuth who was set upon me, you laughed at me because you said that detectives and murderers never met in New York. ”

“ You know the proverb: “Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws up to the door.”
We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can. When the family to which we belong moves into a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and penates, fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of “Home Sweet Home.” We aren’t as green as we look. ”

“ Pearson had a six shooter belted around him. Thus men rode in the Frio country.
At half-past seven in the morning they rode to the top of a hill and saw the Espinosa Ranch, a white spot under a dark patch of live-oaks, five miles away.
The sight roused Pearson from his drooping pose in the saddle. He knew what Road Runner could do. The sorrel was lathered, and stumbling frequently; Road Runner was pegging away like a donkey engine.
Pearson turned toward the sheepman and laughed. “Good-bye, Burr,” he cried, with a wave of his hand. “It’s a race now. We’re on the home stretch.” ”

“ I suppose a new hat is nothing to you, Mr. Pearson. I suppose you think a woman ought to wear an old Stetson five years without a change, as you do. If your old water-hole could have put out the fire on that trestle you might have some reason to talk about it.”
“I am deeply sorry,” said Burrows, warned by Pearson’s fate, “that you failed to receive your hat, Miss Weaver—deeply sorry, indeed. If there was anything I could do—”
“Don’t bother,” interrupted Tonia, with sweet sarcasm. “If there was anything you could do, you’d be doing it, of course. There isn’t.” ”

“ They came upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was the brush that scarcely could a rabbit penetrate the mass. They were in the great, lonely thicket of the Frio bottoms.
It was a mere nothing for a cattleman or a sheepman to be lost for a day or a night. The thing often happened. It was merely a matter of missing a meal or two and sleeping comfortably on your saddle blankets on a soft mattress of mesquite grass. But in Sam’s case it was different. He had never been away from his ranch at night. Marthy was afraid of the country—afraid of Mexicans, of snakes, of panthers, even of sheep. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I said, emphatically.
“Not by ordinary methods,” said Knight. “I might walk up and down Broadway for a month without success. But you have aroused my pride, doctor; and if I fail to show you Shamrock Jolnes this day, I promise you I will never kill or rob in your city again.”
“Nonsense, man,” I replied. “When our burglars walk into our houses and politely demand, thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels, and then dine and bang the piano an hour or two before leaving, how do you, a mere murderer, expect to come in contact with the detective that is looking for you?” ”

“ I can’t help but be sorry about that hat.”
“A straw,” said Tonia; “the latest shape, of course; trimmed with red roses. That’s what I like—red roses.”
“There’s no color more becoming to your complexion and hair,” said Burrows, admiringly.
“It’s what I like,” said Tonia. “And of all the flowers, give me red roses. Keep all the pinks and blues for yourself. But what’s the use, when trestles burn and leave you without anything? It’ll be a dry old Easter for me!”
Pearson took off his hat and drove Road Runner at a gallop into the chaparral east of the Espinosa ranch house. ”

“ My townspeople began to look upon me as a citizen of some consequence instead of the merry trifler I had been when I clerked in the hardware store.
After five or six months the spontaniety seemed to depart from my humor. Quips and droll sayings no longer fell carelessly from my lips. I was sometimes hard run for material. I found myself listening to catch available ideas from the conversation of my friends. Sometimes I chewed my pencil and gazed at the wall paper for hours trying to build up some gay little bubble of unstudied fun. ”

“ In conclusion, I will say that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife’s confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook in hand.
Our business has prospered finely. I keep the books and look after the shop, while Peter attends to outside matters. ”

“ The comedy swiftly rises into thrilling and unexpectedly developed drama. Capt. Marchmont suddenly becomes cognizant that his wife is an unscrupulous adventuress, who has deceived him from the day of their first meeting. The rapid and mortal duel between them from that moment—she with her magnificent lies and siren charm, winding about him like a serpent, trying to recover her lost ground; he with his man’s agony and scorn and lost faith, trying to tear her from his heart. ”

“ The little feathered couriers from the meadows and woods chirping sweetly to us of blue skies and flowering fields. The confounded little squint-eyed nuisances yawping like a flock of steam pianos, and stuffing themselves like aldermen with grass seeds and bugs, while a man sits on a bench and goes without his breakfast. Yes, sir, birds! look at them!”
As I spoke I picked up a dead tree branch that lay by the bench, and hurled it with all my force into a close congregation of the sparrows on the grass. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ Divided you stand, united you fall. E pluribus nihil. Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, “Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse to-morrow. This is a sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the next handicap.’
“I can imagine the tortured feelings of a prisoner in the hands of New York policemen when an infuriated mob demands that he be turned over to them for lynching. ”

“ Suppose there ain’t but one hat in the Lone Elm store, Burr!”
“Then,” said Burrows, darkly, “the best man of us’ll take it back to the Espinosa.”
“Oh, man!” cried Pearson, throwing his hat high and catching it again, “there’s nothing like you come off the sheep ranges before. You talk good and collateral to the occasion. And if there’s more than one?”
“Then,” said Burrows, “we’ll pick our choice and one of us’ll get back first with his and the other won’t.”
“There never was two souls,” proclaimed Pearson to the stars, “that beat more like one heart than yourn and mine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It must have been about four in the afternoon when Sam’s conscience awoke. He was limp and drenched, rather from anxiety than the heat or fatigue. Until now he had been hoping to strike the trail that led to the Frio crossing and the Chapman ranch. He must have crossed it at some dim part of it and ridden beyond. If so he was now something like fifty miles from home. If he could strike a ranch—a camp—any place where he could get a fresh horse and inquire the road, he would ride all night to get back to Marthy and the kid. ”

“ Further conversation was held, and in ten minutes the Dixie Belle turned her nose toward a little, cranky wooden pier on the left bank, and the captain, relinquishing the wheel to a roustabout, came to the passenger deck and made the remarkable announcement: “All out for Skyland.”
The Blaylocks and J. Pinkney Bloom disembarked, and the Dixie Belle proceeded on her way up the lake. Guided by the indefatigable promoter, they slowly climbed the steep hillside, pausing often to rest and admire the view. Finally they entered the village of Cold Branch. ”