Hilda backed, coughing with excited laughter, from the communicating door. And a few minutes later there followed the old man across the snow in the moonlight a queer figure—a little girl with a pair of Frosty MacQueen’s heavy woolen socks pulled on over her shoes and stockings, a man’s corduroy coat reaching to her skirt edge, its sleeves hanging six or eight inches below her little paws like the sleeves of ancient Russian boyars, a woolen comforter tied over head and neck, a hoe grasped valiantly in one hand, and a long string of pathetically hopeful Bar Thirteen cows trailing after.
The snow was raked from the small stack of coarse Laguna hay; but the old cattleman had been right, the cows were too thirsty to eat. They nosed it and turned away, muttering, to mumble at the snow. Uncle Hank knew in the stillness, and without any light, that Hilda’s big black eyes were filling, and she was struggling with sobs.
“All right,” he spoke out cheerily, shouldering his axe; “now we’ll get a right good drink for ’em; an’ it’s turning off so warm that the tank ain’t likely to freeze again this trip.”
With a queer sound that might have been a cough, a sob, or a chuckle, the child grasped his hand, and together they hurried around the tank, where the old man, addressing himself vigorously to the task, soon had the thick ice which covered it broken up until only one great cake rode in the middle. Then he set Hilda—who was laughing joyously as she looked on and applauded—across the tank from him, provided with a long pole to push the big ice-cake toward him, and smashed it also. The poor thirsty cattle, who had followed trustingly close at their heels, crowded up to drink; and when Santa Claus and Kris Kringle reached the ranchhouse door they could look back and see the happy Bar Thirteens clustered around their Christmas tree, “taking off the presents,” as Hilda said. “And, oh, Uncle Hank,” squeezing his hand hard between her two little ones, “isn’t it—just—beautiful!”
Supper found the little kitchen bare of any object suspicious to the eye (even the eye very, very big, very black, and preposterously keen, of eight years old), but in the air still hung a noble aroma, and Lily, the white cat, paced up and down, mewing now and then, rubbing against old Hank’s legs, and stopping to sniff most indelicately at the pantry door.
Hilda giggled—or would it be more exact to say that a giggle rippled its way from the little girl’s abashed and apologetic throat—when the old man spoke reproachfully:
“You, Lily! I’m plumb outdone with you. Don’t I tell you they ain’t no mice in there—leastways none that you could ketch?”
The meal went off amid a sort of eccentric joviality, which was liable to blossom into open hilarity with no particular cause apparent; indeed, joy bubbled so hard that there seemed perpetual danger of a wholesale eruption.
“’Spect you better go to bed right soon,” the old man cautioned. “And don’t forget to hang up a good long stocking.”
“Why, Uncle Hank, do you believe Santa Claus can get down a stove pipe?” gurgled Hilda in an ecstasy of delight.