O. Henry's The Snow Man

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.

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), "The Snow Man", Hampton's Magazine. New York : Broadway Magazine, Incorporated, 1910. Written for Hampton's Magazine shortly before Porter's death, he only completed about to the point where the girl enters the story. The plot, the details and the characters are all O. Henry's but the final writing was completed by Harris Merton Lyon (1882-1916).

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