“I’ve got yer now,” Jericho Bob said, creeping softly after him. “I’ve got yer now, sure,” he was just repeating, when, with a deafening roar the express-train for New York came tearing down the road.
For what possible reason it slowed up on approaching the freight-car nobody ever knew; but the fact remains that it did, just as Jericho Bob laid his wicked black, paw on the turkey’s tail.
The turkey shrieked, spread his wings, shook the small black boy’s grasp from his tail, and with a mighty swoop alighted on the roof of the very last car as it passed; and in a moment more Jericho Bob’s Thanksgiving dinner had vanished, like a beautiful dream, down the road!
Jerusalem Artie’s Christmas Dinner[31]
Jerusalem Artie sat on the door-step of his mammy’s cabin, buried in thought. It was a very unusual condition for Jerusalem Artie, but then, the occasion was an unusual one. The next day would be Christmas.
Presently he looked up. “Mammy,” he questioned, “what’s we-all a-gwine hab fo’ Chris-mus dinnah?”
“Lan’ sakes, chile,” his mammy answered, “how-all’s I a-gwine know dat? Yo’ pappy ain’t got nuthin’ yit, an’ I ain’t a-reckonin’ he will git nuthin’.”
Jerusalem Artie looked down, and was once more lost in thought.
He made a comical little figure there on the door-step, but to this fact both he and his mammy were blissfully oblivious. On his head he wore an old straw hat which his pappy had discarded for a fur cap at the approach of winter weather. In the spring the exchange would be made again, and Jerusalem Artie would wear the fur. But this did not trouble the boy. When it grew too hot, he left off any sort of head covering; and when it grew too cold, he wrapped one of mammy’s gay bandanas about his woolly head, and set the battered straw on top of that.