“Sure!” replied the old man gravely, but with twinkling eye. “He knows many a way to get in where the stocking is—that draws him, as you might say.”
Together they unearthed from big Frosty MacQueen’s kit an amazing and Brobdingnagian pair of golf hose. “These was sure made for this business,” murmured Hank in chuckling enjoyment, as he gazed upon them. He helped the little girl fasten one of the great, gayly plaided things to the wall behind the stove, all the time muttering delighted comments upon their size and the cheerfulness of their color scheme.
“Well, now, you hang up the other one for your own self,” suddenly urged Hilda, though she looked a little doubtfully at its capaciousness.
“Huh?” exclaimed the old man, facing around upon her. “Don’t you reckon Sandy Claus would get sort of mixed up by me being at the Bar Thirteen, when I ought, speaking proper and by the book to be at Mesquite—or to home at the Three Sorrers ranch house?”
Hilda shook her head. “He won’t get mixed up about you any more than he will about me,” she argued, with lips that tried hard not to break into laughter.
“Well—now!” he murmured, pinning up the second stocking beside the first. “I—er—mm—” He trailed off into silence; but it could not last long. Something must say itself. “I take that mighty kind in Sandy Claus,” thumping his thumb briskly and never knowing it. “It’s right gentlemanly of him to spend the whole day fixing for—ouch!” suddenly realizing the pounded thumb—“I mean, you know, for him to go a-loping all over the Texas Panhandle hunting for me. If Sandy Claus wasn’t most generally understood to be a man—a little old fat man—I’d say it was plumb sweet of him.”
Well, well! Then to bed! It had been a busy day. The sharp tussle with the cows’ Christmas tree in the frosty air had left the little girl ready for deep, dreamless sleep, and it seemed but a moment after she had shut her eyes, when she heard Uncle Hank calling from the kitchen:
“Better get up and ’tend to that stocking, or it might take legs and walk away!”
She was out of bed with one bound. There was a good fire; and behind the roaring stove hung a stocking that bulged and—yes, and twitched! As she looked, a small three-cornered white ear, pink-lined and furry, came in view above the hem. Its mate followed; and then two round bright eyes with an utterly adorable slant, as a sleepy white kitten looked out and yawned at her.
She slipped into her dress, then cried: “It’s alive! It’s a kitten—a real, live, human kitten! Oh, come and see it, Uncle Hank!”