“What yo’ got in your haid, boy?” Uncle Rufus demanded.
“’Tain’t in my head. It’s in our woodshed,” confessed Sammy. “But don’t you tell nobody, Uncle Rufus.”
“I can’t tell what I don’t know,” admitted the old colored man, who always entered into the spirit of the children’s plays.
“It’s going to be a surprise for everybody,” declared Sammy. “You leave the door unlocked, Uncle Rufus, and you’ll all know what it is in the morning.”
And it certainly was a surprise! Sammy Pinkney was famous for surprising people.
Everybody had at last gone to bed in the big house—Linda and Uncle Rufus on the third floor, and Mrs. McCall and the rest of the family in their several rooms on the second. Midnight had some time passed when everybody was awakened—but that gradually—by a tintinnabulation of silvery bells.
“What is it?” gasped Dot, from her little bed, to Tess, in hers. It was a wonder that the littlest Corner House girl woke up at all, for she was usually a very sound sleeper. But her head was full of Santa Claus on this night. “Is that reindeer bells, Tess?” she demanded.
“Then they are inside the house, and I don’t believe they could come down our chimney, big as it is,” declared Tess.
“Sammy Pinkney came down it once—you remember?”
“But he doesn’t ring like bells,” was the very practical reply.