The Ledbetter homestead was some distance from the highroad behind a screen of hills, and an old shed into which the afternoon sun shone with warm approval afforded privacy for the trimming of the tree. Though one pair of hands trembled with age and one pair with eagerness, as early as the twenty-second of December it stood in glorious completeness. The calico frocks, tightly rolled and tied with twine, swung from the stoutest branches, while the twigs bore fruit of plug tobacco and candy in wasteful and bewildering abundance.
“Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five,” counted the tired little Santa Claus as he lay on his bed that night. Three æons the days seemed to him and he sighed himself off to the land of Nod. The old man too slipped smoothly off to sleep, but he sighed as he went to think that time flies so fast. Dixie took no note of time, but before morning he took note of a bear that came nosing about the premises, attracted by the smell of sweets, and he barked so frantically as to bring the old man upon the spot armed with a musket that had seen service in ’61. Bruin retired from the scene with a leaden Christmas gift under his hide and gran’daddy wrapped himself in a tattered cloak of army gray and patrolled till morning. He felt hardly equal to two more nights of keeping guard, so he said to his grandson over their early breakfast:
“This is a mighty pretty day and it might rain a-Christmas.”
So they made out their itinerary at once and, though they were subject to some delays and gran’daddy remarked as he groped for his gloves in the wood box among dish towels, frying pans, broken dishes, and wearing apparel, “It’s quare what a way things has of skulking out of sight when they’re wanted,” and the little boy replied as he tore a strip from a window curtain and gartered his stocking, “It’s ’cause we ain’t got no woman here to keep ’em in their place,” by sunrise the oxen were hitched up and the premature Christmas tree started on its journey.
It was a day of gentle, insinuative, persistent sunshine, such as in these mountains December is not chary of. The frost-sheathed trees of the highest ridges lay like a long fluff of white ostrich feathers against the azure; light snows and partial thaws had converted the nearer mountain sides into a darkly crayoned network of lines and angles upon a dappled ground; all around them clustered the innumerable beauties of the winter landscape, and only the roads were vile.
The old man looked a veritable Santa Claus. Recognizing the churchly significance of the occasion, he had unbraided his beard and it fell before him a rippling, silver shield; beneath his gray slouch hat his kind eyes twinkled in their coverts of shaggy beetle-brows and, unconsciously completing the picture, he had discarded his tobacco for a corn-cob pipe.
Beside him, his little heart a-flutter but his face held resolutely serious, sat his grandson and between them sat Dixie for, in recognition of his services of the night, he too had been advanced to the position of a Santa Claus and in a far corner of the wagon, where the benefactor would not be tempted to test for himself the comparative blessedness of giving and receiving, was a stack of bones (there had been a “killing” the day before) for Dixie to bestow upon his canine acquaintances.
To old Mis’ Jimson the tree was carried in pristine completeness. From the well where she was trying to persuade her cow that a handful of meal in two gallons of water is mush, she espied its green top coming up behind the hill. For a moment she watched it grow, but before the oxen came into sight she hobbled away in terror to her cabin.
“I knowed it,” she said. “I knowed that ar owl a-hootin’ ’fore the door all night, meant some kind of meanness. ‘Trees as men walkin’”—she paraphrased unwittingly, and she didn’t know whether the text was history or prophecy. But she grabbed her testament from off the shelf and a rabbit’s foot from out the button box, reassuring herself by a swift glance that it was the left hind one (no other “keeps a man from harm”), pressed the two together, and ventured to take another look. She recognized the oxen, the wagon, and its occupants. Her terror fled, but she stood transfixed with amazement.
“Mis’ Jimson, this ’ere’s a sure ’nough Chrisamas tree,” called Grover Cleveland.