But for Robby? Oh, there was the horned toad she had heard about. Robby had seen one in some show or other at home, and had longed for it. Here it was to his hand,—if she could find it. And with the help of the man who had helped her before, and who could not fancy what she wanted it for, find it she did. Robby would be delighted.
If Nancy had been born in the region, or was living in any town there, she would have found no difficulty in making Christmas presents like those she had hitherto given; but these gifts that she found possible were unique and unlike anything she could have obtained at her old home.
And now for sweetmeats. Well, they had dried some of the luscious grapes and there were the raisins in the pantry, just oozing and crusted with sugar; and there was the barrel of molasses from the sugar-mill down on the Brazos; no one could make more delicate candy than Nancy could and did; and there had been a great harvest of pecan-nuts; and thus, so far as the stockings were concerned, Christmas had no more to ask.
The expected day was close at hand, and Nancy pictured to herself how it would all go off—how the stockings would be hung up, how Johnny would help with the chair and then be in bed before his own gift appeared, and how she would be up at the peep of dawn to go out and bring in that baby fox—the delicate, delicious, dewy dawn—and make his bed under Johnny’s stocking, tying his leash to the toe, after fastening it securely to a hook in the chimney; and how she would untwist and unbind and unlace a great bunch of the roses outside that were having a late blossoming on their luxuriant growth, and bring it into the window and train it all around the room under the ceiling. It would be—well, as beautiful as the Christmas green; it couldn’t be more beautiful, she said in her thoughts.
It was at this time that Mrs. Murtrie began to be a little anxious about her husband. He should have returned from his hunting-trip some days before, and he was still absent, no one could say where. And, of course, she was conjuring up all sorts of frightful possibilities in the way of accidents, and Marnie was helping her; and Nancy herself, although ordinarily holding her father to be invulnerable, felt a degree of alarm as she thought what if he had fallen into some gulch, or lost his way, or drowned in one of the rivers that rose, after a rain in the hills, so swiftly that, in a town below, a man had been overtaken before he could get off the bridge. As for Johnny, he was for going out to find his father, if he only knew which way to go. As night fell, and it was Christmas eve, the house was full of a sort of electric tension; no one said just what every one was thinking, till suddenly Bessie broke out with a great sob, and cried: “I want my papa!” Then every one fell to comforting her, and all were furtively wiping away tears, when steps rang on the gallery, the door burst open, and the father, with his blue eyes shining out of his browned skin, and his great voice resonant, stood before them, holding an immense bird with wide-spreading wings.
“It’s a wild turkey,” he said, after the uproarious greetings, and as soon as they loosened their embraces. “I was resolved not to come back without a turkey for Christmas. And it’s a great deal richer and sweeter than any home-made bird, as you’ll see when it’s roasted.”
A turkey! And Nancy had but lately been bemoaning herself that the dinner would be without a turkey. She had gone to bed, and so did not see her mother seize the wings of the wild trophy, and trim them, and run out to the kitchen to the adjacent building and dry them well in a hot oven, and later trim them again, and bind them at the base with the palms of an old kid glove and so finish for Nancy’s Christmas as fine a feather fan as one could wish to wave on a hot summer afternoon.
But at last, when the house was quite still, Nancy crept out of her room and summoned Johnny to help her with the chair. Johnny was too sleepy not to be glad to be dismissed after that, and then she disposed of the presents exactly as she had planned, and wondered what the large parcel was, swinging by a string from her own stocking, and went to sleep to the tune of the song a mocking-bird sang, sweet, and strong, and joyous, in the pecan-tree outside, till a rising wind swept it away. And if you could have looked into the living-room of that bungalow next morning, you would have seen Johnny hugging his baby fox, and Bessie hugging her doll and Marnie chirping to her birds, and their mother putting spools, and needles, and scissors into her work-basket, and the father taking his ease in his big chair with its shining supports, and Nancy leisurely fanning herself, as if there were not a norther blowing outside, which, had the casements been open, would have blown the rain quite across the room. Rain? No, oh, no! For, see! look! For a wonder, the loveliest, silveriest, soft snow was falling, which, even if it melted to-morrow, made Nancy’s northern heart feel, in her southern home, the spirit of Christmas everywhere.
[15] Reprinted from “St. Nicholas Magazine” with permission.