She turned and glanced over her shoulder at tracks in the snow—shapeless holes, and filling fast—which she did not doubt were the footprints of the big red cow, standing half in and half out of the wide door, slowly chewing her cud, her breath visibly curling out on the chill air, her great lips opening to emit a muttered low. She moved forward suddenly into the shelter as Evelina started anew toward it, holding the piggin in one hand and clasping the baby in the other arm.
Evelina noted the sound of her brothers' two axes, busy at the wood-pile, their regular cleavage splitting the air with a sharp stroke and bringing a crystalline shivering echo from the icy mountain. She did not see the crouching figure that came cautiously burrowing out from the stack. Absalom rose to his full height, looking keenly about him the while, and stole noiselessly in the soft snow to the stable, and peered in through a crevice in the wall.
Evelina had placed the piggin upon the straw-covered ground, and stood among the horned cattle and the huddling sheep, her soft melancholy face half shaded by the red shawl thrown over her head and shoulders. A tress of her brown hair escaped and curled about her white neck, and hung down over the bosom of her dark-blue homespun dress. Against her shoulder the dun-colored cow rubbed her horned head. The baby was in a pensive mood, and scarcely babbled. The reflection of the snow was on his face, heightening the exquisite purity of the tints of his infantile complexion. His gentle, fawn-like eyes were full of soft and lustrous languors. His long lashes drooped over them now, and again were lifted. His short down of yellow hair glimmered golden against the red shawl over his mother's shoulders.
One of the beasts sank slowly upon the ground—a tired creature doubtless, and night was at hand; then another, and still another. Their posture reminded Absalom, as he looked, that this was Christmas Eve, and of the old superstition that the cattle of the barns spend the night upon their knees, in memory of the wondrous Presence that once graced their lowly place. The boughs rattled suddenly in the chill blast above his head; the drifts fell about him. He glanced up mechanically to see in the zenith a star of gracious glister, tremulous and tender, in the rifts of the breaking clouds.
"I wonder ef it air the same star o' Bethlehem?" he said, thinking of the great sidereal torch heralding the Light of the World. He had a vague sense that this star has never set, however the wandering planets may come and go in their wide journeys as the seasons roll. He looked again into the glooming place, at the mother and her child, remembering that the Lord of heaven and earth had once lain in a manger, and clung to a humble earthly mother.
The man shook with a sudden affright. He had intended to wrest the child from her grasp, and mount and ride away; he was roused from his reverie by the thrusting upon him of his opportunity, facilitated a hundredfold. Evelina had evidently forgotten something. She hesitated for a moment; then put the baby down upon a great pile of straw among the horned creatures, and, catching her shawl about her head, ran swiftly to the house.
Absalom moved mechanically into the doorway. The child, still pensive and silent, and looking tenderly infantile, lay upon the straw. A sudden pang of pity for her pierced his heart: how her own would be desolated! His horse, hitched in a clump of cedars, awaited him ten steps away. It was his only chance—his last chance. And he had been hardly entreated. The child's eyes rested, startled and dilated, upon him; he must be quick.
The next instant he turned suddenly, ran hastily through the snow, crashed among the cedars, mounted his horse, and galloped away.
It was only a moment that Evelina expected to be at the house, but the gourd of salt which she sought was not in its place. She hurried out with it at last, unprescient of any danger until all at once she saw the footprints of a man in the snow, otherwise untrodden, about the fodder-stack. She still heard the two axes at the wood-pile. Her father, she knew, was at the house.
A smothered scream escaped her lips. The steps had evidently gone into the stable, and had come out thence. Her faltering strength could scarcely support her to the door. And then she saw lying in the straw Elnathan Daniel, beginning to babble and gurgle again, and to grow very pink with joy over a new toy—a man's glove, a red woollen glove, accidentally dropped in the straw. She caught it from his hands, and turned it about curiously. She had knit it herself—for Absalom!