Surely no better refuge could have been found for Christmas fugitives than the camp on Nobsco Head. Clad in black firs and bound with iron rock, the headland thrust itself into the icy waters of the bay. Half-buried now in the white drifts of winter, the little house stood solitary—three miles by road from the village of Crosset Cove, and a half-mile, at least, from the little settlement known as Hardscrabble.
It was from Hardscrabble that Serena Wetherbee came—a grim, gaunt woman, who not only had lost three children, but had never learned from the waves where they had flung the body of her sailor husband. To warn her not to talk of Christmas seemed superfluous. But on the fourth evening, while they were all three sitting round the glowing airtight stove in the camp living-room, Justine politely asked Serena what she was knitting, and received an unexpected answer.
“Christmas presents,” said Serena Wetherbee. “A pair of mittens for Jacob Tracy, and striped reins for his little sister Emmy. Haven’t you noticed? He’s Heman Tracy’s boy, that brings the milk over from Hardscrabble, and they’re poorer than Job’s turkey. There’ll be a tree over at Hardscrabble schoolhouse,—there always is,—and those Tracy young ones shan’t go without presents, not while I’m afoot.”
With a word of excuse and good night, Justine rose and went to her room. But Serena Wetherbee talked on:
“I don’t know, after all, if there’ll be a tree this year at Hardscrabble. Have you seen the school-ma’am, Doctor Sarah? She’s a Nash, from over in Jefferson—one of those bred-in-the-bone old maids that would turn cream sour just by looking at it. Like as not she’ll set up for not having a tree to the schoolhouse.”
But evidently Serena did not believe this dire prophecy, for she was as horrified as Doctor Peavey by the developments of the next day. The two women were in the kitchen when small Jacob Tracy clumped in out of the twilight, leading a sobbing little sister.
“Now you just shut up, Emmy Tracy!” Jacob said, but not unkindly. “You ask Aunt Sereny and she’ll tell you it ain’t so at all.”
Serena Wetherbee lifted the child to her lap.
“Tell aunty all about it, deary!”
“She says—teacher says—there ain’t—there ain’t no Sa-anta Claus—and there won’t be a tree at Hardscrabble—and no Christmas! And I’d wrote Santa Claus—to bring me a dolly with hair—and there ain’t—there ain’t no—”