“I hope now he isn’t laughing at what we’ve given him,” he muttered half under his breath. “He’s certainly as full of curiosity as a youngster waking up in the moonlight, and creeping out of bed to see what Santa has left for him; and that’s what I did once myself. There, he’s satisfied now, anyway, and is trotting off to his cot again.”
After that Dick again set himself the task of trying to get to sleep, though he found it the hardest kind of work. Even this latest strange action on the part of Uncle Silas worried him. He remembered all that Leslie had ever said about the wanderer. Could it be possible that Uncle Silas was an impostor; or that he had actually planned to come and settle down on his poor sister, to be taken care of for the balance of his natural life?
“Oh! shucks! forget all that stuff, can’t you?” Dick scolded himself as he turned once more with his back to the open door, so as to shut out the flickering firelight. “Uncle Silas is all right, and you know it. He’s only a little queer in the upper story. You know he told how he was struck on the head once by a falling rock, and nearly killed. Now go to sleep, so you’ll feel fresh when morning comes.”
Nevertheless, it must have been close on to midnight when Dick finally managed to drop off. What his dreams were no one ever knew, but at least he did sleep until the sun was above the horizon on that bright Christmas morning, which was something unusual for him, as he always attended to the chores promptly in order to save the little mother steps.
So Dick hastily dressed, his mind beginning to fill once more with a confusion of anxieties and hopes, as all that had taken place on the previous afternoon and evening trooped through his active brain.
“Tomorrow I’ll begin to look for a situation,” he was saying as he finished his dressing. “Perhaps better days will be coming along later on, when I can complete my education. I can hear mother in the kitchen; perhaps she may need something, so I’ll find out.”
“Nothing to be done, Son,” Mrs. Horner announced, after kissing him warmly, and returning his greeting of a Merry Christmas. “But I hear some one knocking at the front door, so go and answer, for I think I saw Leslie pass the kitchen window.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
UNCLE SILAS, THE WIZARD
“Hello! there! Merry Christmas to you, Dick, old chum!” exclaimed Leslie, as he pushed in through the door as soon as it was opened. “Here’s a little something I know you’ve been wanting this long while.”
“Oh, my stars! a pair of dandy hockey skates!” gasped the astonished Dick, as he tore the paper from the package that had been thrust into his hands. “You’ve just about knocked me silly, Leslie, for a fact. And my present to you is such a little one, too.”