And then suddenly, as the angry words resounded and echoed in her mind, she asked herself what made Christmas, anyway? Certainly it wasn’t the things people did. In some places they kept it with blowing of horns and burning of fire-crackers, as they did Fourth of July. Perhaps in that way they expressed as much gladness as others did with the pealing from belfries and the rolling of organ tones. For Christmas was a time to be glad that Christ came to make all Christendom good, and blessed, and happy.
And, just as suddenly, Nancy could not help asking herself what she was doing to express gladness or to make Christmas happy. North pole or south pole, Christmas was Christmas, and it wasn’t all in pleasure or all in gifts; and she got out of bed, and knelt down and said a prayer, and went to sleep in a better frame of mind.
But if it wasn’t all in pleasures or all in gifts, there must be some gifts; and next day, Nancy set herself to thinking out the problem. It was still some time before the great holiday, and every hour must be improved.
For the first thing, she betook herself to one of the men on the range who often came about the buildings; and he found for her several huge horns, and, with his help, and taking Johnny into her confidence, they took grease and brick-dust and scraped and polished these horns till they shone almost like silver. Then the three dug for a big mesquit root and secured one, at last, that grew from a great stock; and they scraped and polished that into a very handsome piece of wood; and, having a little knack of carpentry, they fitted the enormous horns into the mesquit root, and there was a chair for any palace. It was to be their father’s, and was to stand on the gallery, where, some night, the night-blooming cereus that laced the whole front would open its slow, delicious flowers, and shed the balm of heaven about him.
They found it a little difficult to keep this secret, because they began work upon it before Mr. Murtrie went off on his hunting-trip with some friends; but after he had gone, things were easier, as the mother was not inclined to prowl about and look into everything, as the head of a house sometimes thinks necessary.
And for the mother,—they knew where some tall flat grasses grew, near a stream that was brimming at this season, and Johnny waded in and got them. Nancy plaited them into a low work-basket, and lined it with a bit of silk that had been her doll’s skirt in her day of dolls. The doll, that had been religiously put away, was taken from her slumbers and furbished for Bessie’s Christmas. “Why, really, it’s going to be a Christmas, after all,” she said.
“Only it’s so queer to have it so warm,” grumbled Johnny. “Winter without snowballing isn’t winter!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nancy, beginning to defend the thing she had adopted.
The man who had found the horns for her found also a little baby fox, and that was kept in great seclusion to become, on Christmas morning, a pet for Johnny; and Marnie and Nancy had great times together feeding it. He had the funniest little bark already. “Oh, we are coming along!” cried Nancy.
But there was more to be done. She remembered that once, when her father had taken her to see the ruins of the old mission, she had observed a number of Mexican “shacks,” or huts, near by. She saw the dinner of one family, which consisted of half a sweet-potato and a red pepper. But she had also seen a big cage full of canarios. And so Nancy and Johnny set out to walk over to the mission, losing their way several times, but finding it again all at once. There an Indian woman, who was about thirty years old and looked a hundred, flung her baby, which was the loveliest little harmony of brown and rose you ever saw, into her husband’s arms, and, after a great deal of pantomime and dumb show, sold, for the price of the last piece of silver in Nancy’s purse, a pair of the canarios in a cage made of reeds, each one an exquisite pinch of feathers, a lot of living gems, of all colors of the rainbow, blue, and yellow, and green, and purple, and red, and brown—iridescent little things, with a song like the faintest, prettiest echo of a Hartz canary’s song. And there was Marnie’s Christmas present settled.