“You sure you got that list o’ things I wrote down for you?” asked Ma’am Hickey. “Men ain’t got any kind of a mem’ry when it comes to shoppin’.”
“I got the list right here in this pocket,” replied Dan, patting his broad chest. “If we have good luck we’ll be back by noon day after to-morrow, an’ that night is Christmas eve, so you’ll want the tree all ready. Did the little folks sleep good?”
“They never stirred; but once the little boy laughed out in his sleep an’ said somethin’ about a steam-engine. Both of the children are sleepin’ yet.”
An hour later the children were up and were eating their breakfast in Ma’am Hickey’s cozy kitchen, which was also the dining-room of the hotel.
“Will my papa come to-day?” asked Freddy, as he helped himself to a hot doughnut.
“Don’t worry none about your papa, deary,” Ma’am Hickey said. “We’ll see to you all right. Let’s talk about Christmas.”
“I never talked so much about Christmas in all the born days of my life as I talked about it in them two days,” said Ma’am Hickey, afterward. “It was the only way I could git their minds off their pa.”
Ma’am Hickey’s account of the Christmas tree at Singing River is so much more interesting than any account I could give of it, that I think it best to let her tell about it in her own way:
“You see, Big Dan an’ Joe Burke got back all right the middle of the afternoon the day before Christmas. They looked like a pair o’ pack peddlers, an’ they were about fagged out, for they had had a hard time of it pullin’ up over the mountain trails in a snow-storm. Joe said he didn’t think he could have dragged himself another mile for love nor money. He had two big turkeys on his back besides a great lot of other things.
“Well, the men in the camp had been busy, too. They had cut a big pine an’ set it up in the hall over the post-office, an’ the way they had dec’rated the hall with evergreen was beautiful. You couldn’t see an inch of the ugly bare logs nor of the bare rafters. They set to an’ scrubbed the floor an’ washed the winders, an’ strung up a lot o’ red, white and blue buntin’ I happened to have in the house, an’ I tell you the little old hall did look scrumptious. I kep’ the children in the kitchen with me, where I was makin’ pies an’ cake an’ doughnuts most o’ the time. I give ’em dough to muss with, an’ let ’em scrape the cake-dishes, an’ tried to keep ’em interested all the time, so they wouldn’t ask about their pa.