“Guess so!”
“You can leave that ‘pedalmobile’ here. Wait a minute! Mother’s just putting some Christmas ‘grub,’ mince-pies an’ things, into a basket for old Ma’am Baldwin; we’ll deposit it at her door as we go along!”
“How’d it be to write on it, ‘Merry Christmas from the Owls’?” suggested young Colin whimsically: “that would keep her guessing; she’d maybe think birds had come out o’ the woods to feed her as they did Elijah or Elisha of old.”
So a card was tacked to the basket, on which was traced with a stub-end of colored chalk the outline of a perching owl, highly rufous as to plumage, with the proposed salutation beneath it.
But the two Owls who placed the gift did not find the recipient at home. That baldfaced house beyond the frost-spiked marshes was empty, its paintless door, half screened by the icy boughs of the wind-beaten apple-tree, fast locked.
“I guess she’s gone over to the town to spend Christmas Eve with her daughter,” suggested Colin. “She dotes on her gran’son, little Jack Barry; he’s quite a boy for nine years old! What shall we do with the basket?”
“Raise that kitchen window an’ slip it inside—the fastening’s broken!”
“Say! but you’re as barefaced as the house.” Colin hugged himself with a sense of having got off a good joke as he watched Leon boldly raise the loose window and deposit the present within. “Let’s put for the woods now!” he added, the deed accomplished.
And the two scouts climbed the uplands toward those midwinter woods that crowned the heights in dismantled majesty.
But they were not robbed of beauty, the December woods: the frosty sunshine knew that as it picked out the berry-laden black alders displaying their coral branches against the velvet background of a pine, and embraced the regiment of hemlock bushes, green dwarfs which, together with their full-sized brothers, held the fort for spring against all the hosts of winter.