“He was only kept prisoner by the Indians,” says my father, “and sick and ill-used. But he had no notion he was dead till he got away after a few years, and heard his widow was married again, and even mother to another child.”
“It’s a likely story,” says cousin Andy Sanders, “that a man wouldn’t come forward and claim his own in such a case.”
“Your notion of a man and mine never did agree, Andy Sanders,” says my father. “She wasn’t to blame, and her second husband was my best friend. The boy and girl are mine now.”
“It’s some robbing scheme,” says aunt Ibby, but she looked as if she knew him well enough.
“I’ve more to give them than you could have taken from them,” he says, “and you may begin to investigate to-night. Is that the Widow Briggs’s boy?” he says.
The Briggs boy came up and shook hands with him, and the other men stepped in and shook hands, too. They all begun to talk. But uncle Moze, and aunt Ibby, and cousin Andy Sanders left the door, and I heard them slam the gate.
Mrar slept right along, though the neighbors talked so loud and fast; and I sat down on the lounge at her feet, wondering what she would say Christmas morning when she found out the Whizzer was my own father, that mother thought was dead since I’s a year old!
I felt so queer and glad that something in me whizzed like the wheel, and while my father was not looking, and everybody sat up to the fire asking questions, I slipped over and tried to hug it around the cranks that he wiggled with his feet.
You can read pieces about Santa Claus coming on a sledge, but that’s nothing to having your own father—that you think is dead and gone—ride up like a regular Whizzer and open the house for Christmas!