At last the outer wrappings were cast aside, and, as Betty stood before them, a small, slim figure, very different in appearance from the shapeless, roly-poly bundle of a short time previous, with her fair hair ruffled into little curls and tendrils that made a soft nimbus about her head, she seemed even more like some lovely spirit than they, awed by the strangeness of her coming, had thought her. Yet her first action was quite sufficient to remove all doubts that she belonged to another sphere. Those inquisitive eyes of hers, taking a survey of the room and its inmates, lighted suddenly upon the stockings dangling before the fire; they widened at the sight, then the smiles brimmed over and her whole face broke up into glee. How could she feel strange, or afraid, in a place where—big, grown-up men though they all were—such signs of expectancy were so openly displayed? She slipped from the protecting arm and ran close to the hearth, clapping her hands in delight.
“Oh! you’re all ready for Santa Claus,” she cried. “My! how he’ll have to work—there’s such a ’normous lot. But he’ll fill ’em all.” She threw out this balm in eager haste. “He’s truly coming; he said so. If I’d gone home with him his house would have cracked to—to smither-eens, so I stayed.”
A deafening roar of laughter greeted her words and sent her, unerringly as a homing bird, back to her first friend, who still knelt on the floor; but resting against him her fears vanished almost instantly, and, as she glanced around with renewed confidence, her pretty silvery laugh tinkled out to join their rougher merriment. The men pressed closer, one of them, the oldest, acting as spokesman. He was the man whose chimney had never seen any Christmas stockings hanging before it, the baby’s sock being too tiny in that far-away year; but he seemed to know better than any of them how to ask just the right questions that would set free the little tongue. Betty climbed gladly up on his knee, and from her new perch poured forth an account of her wonderful adventures.
It was the fault of her companions, surely, and not her own that the things that were so real and true to her were like myths out of Fairyland to them, because they had travelled farther down the stream of time. Much of what she said was unintelligible to their dull, grown-up minds; but if each word had been of gold they could not have waited for it more eagerly; and when she stopped in her recital of that marvellous journey to laugh at some remembrance of Santa Claus’ fooling, they looked at one another, smiling in perfectest sympathy. Perhaps, after all, they understood—who shall say? There was no interruption, except when old Jerome hazarded some remark that helped on the tale; and the only person to move was a tall, gaunt man, who bent mysteriously over the fire and made something that smelled like—like the most delicious thing in all the world. You have to ride for hours through the snow, and feel the keen air in your face, and be as hungry as a bear into the bargain, to know just what that is.
By some remarkable law of coincidence the story and the cooking came to an end at one and the same moment; nothing could have been more timely. Betty’s whole attention was quickly transferred to the tin plate which was placed before her; and her evident appreciation of the good things of life was so keen that the lookers-on, who even in that short time had learned that their rougher ways frightened her, laughed gently among themselves. Well, they understood that too! While she was busy over her supper, to the utter forgetting of her surroundings, several of the men went outside to see if they could find any traces of the recreant Santa Claus; they returned after a hasty search, bringing in the barrel and bags—sufficient proof that Terry, despite all convictions, wise head-shakings, and gloomy forebodings, had not failed them. He had kept his word. But the mystery deepened—Who was the little maid? Aside from her name, which was an unfamiliar one to them, they had not been able to learn anything definite about her. The excited little brain only seemed to live over the immediate past, in which Santa Claus had figured so importantly; the fact that she was his sweetheart apparently outweighing every other consideration.
“Terry O’Connor hain’t a chick, nor child, an’ never hed,” old Jerome declared stoutly, as somebody ventured this solution of the difficulty, “nor there ain’t any kin b’longin’ to him—guess I orter know—I’ve knowed him ’nintimut these thirty years—”
“Losh, man!” interrupted Sandy, “then he just inveegled the bairn awa’, makin’ oot he was Santa Claus. The e-normity of it!”
“Oh, Terry must olluz be jokin’; it’s his way,” Jerome returned tolerantly. With his arm around the small form, and the little golden head resting on his breast, he was knowing one of the rare, happy moments of his life; there could be scant condemnation from him under the circumstances.
Betty, who had been alternately blinking at the fire, and smiling contentedly to herself for some time, now interrupted any dispute that might have arisen concerning her absent friend by giving utterance to a series of baby yawns. The discussion came to a speedy close, such signs needing no interpretation to her hearers.
“Don’t ye want to go to sleep, deary?” the old man asked.