As Santa Claus, Owen wore a ruddy mask with a long white beard and bristling eyebrows, a fur cap pulled down over his ears, heavy felt boots and his long fur overcoat. He looked and acted the part so perfectly the children for years insisted that “there is a Santa Claus ’cause we’ve seen him.”
The first Christmas everyone was gathered about the tree waiting for this mysterious personage to appear when Owen suddenly thought of bells; he must have sleigh-bells. No self-respecting Santa Claus was complete without them. I was in despair; there wasn’t a sleigh-bell within a hundred miles, but Owen insisted that he must jingle. At last after a great deal of argument and searching for something which would give forth bell-like sounds, he finally pranced out before the spell-bound audience with my silver table bell sewed to the top of one of his boots. He had to prance because the bell refused to tinkle unless it was shaken, and for the ensuing hour he pranced so vigorously that between the exercise and the fur coat he nearly perished from heat.
After dinner we all assembled in the big living-room, where my disguised husband presented each person with some little gift and ridiculous toy, accompanied by a still more ridiculous rhyme, over which the boys roared. They enjoyed the jokes most of all. No one escaped; Owen and I came in for our share with the rest. Mine usually bore veiled or open allusion to my particular pet lamb which had developed strong butting proclivities. He butted friend and foe indiscriminately, so that even my fond eyes were not blinded to his faults, and Owen’s remarks were most uncomplimentary after he had acted as a shield for us when “Jackie” had chased my sister and me all about the yard.
Later in the afternoon everybody scattered—our house guests amused themselves as they chose, riding, driving or hunting coyotes, the boys rode over to the neighboring ranches or went to “town,” the store and saloon at the railroad station sixteen miles away, but I spent an hour or two playing with the children or reading to them until their father “brought the team around,” their happy mother climbed up on the high seat of the lumber-wagon and, clinging to dolls, trains and toys, three blissfully happy but perfectly exhausted little children were wrapped up in quilts and coats, stowed into the back of the wagon and started on the twenty-mile drive “back home.”
It had been an eventful day in their short, barren lives, but for us it was the best part of Christmas, except the evening, when we all gathered about the big fireplace which drew everyone into its circle like a magnet.
There was nothing prosaic about those who grouped themselves around the great stone fireplaces on the ranches in the old days. Here again were found those contrasts, so striking and unexpected; university men who had come West for adventure or investment, men of wealth whose predisposition to weak lungs had sent them in exile to the wilderness, modest young Englishmen, those younger sons so often found in the most out-of-the-way corners of the earth, and who, through the sudden demise of a near relative, had such a startling way of becoming earls and lords over night; adventurous Scotchmen, brilliant young Irishmen, all smoking contentedly there in the firelight and discussing the “isms” and “ologies” and every other subject under heaven. But most interesting of all were their own reminiscences.
We were all sitting around the fire one Christmas night when the conversation turned on adventure, and everyone promised to tell the most thrilling experience he had ever had.
Two of the men were lying on the big bearskin before the fire. One, a mining engineer, told of having been captured by bandits and held for a ransom, in some remote corner of Mexico where he had gone to examine a very famous mine. The other, a surveyor for the Union Pacific Railroad, had been lost during a storm and, becoming snow-blind, crawled for five miles on his hands and knees, feeling the trail with naked, half frozen hands until he reached the creek down which he waded until he came to the camp.
In a big chair, the firelight playing over her slender figure, sat Janet Courtland, an Eastern woman, who as a mere girl had come West with her young husband and had gone up into Montana where he had bought a large cattle ranch.
“Come on, Mrs. Courtland, you’re next,” the Surveyor said as he finished his story.