"You hustle out an' git the tree," said he, "an' I'll see what else I can scare up in the packs. I know there's a couple of apples an' a orange I throwed in with the grub when we was packin'."
An hour later the two men stood by the boy's bed, their faces fairly shining with the true Christmas spirit over their efforts to make an acceptable Christmas tree out of such scanty material. On the floor at his head stood a small piñon tree top held erect by several stones. Both men had exhausted their ingenuity to find things with which to decorate it and on its branches hung the oddest lot of plunder that ever old "Santy" left on his rounds.
"I'll never miss them spurs," said Bob pointing to an almost new pair he had recently bought, "an' Dummy, he's been just daffy about 'em."
"Same with that new knife," said Stanley. "I jist bought it to be a doin' somethin' an' I know Dummy ain't got one that'll cut cold butter."
In nine separate little packages wrapped in newspaper the silver dollars were swinging at the end of pieces of thread from a spool in Bob's "war bag," the loose silver had been placed in two empty tobacco sacks each hanging pendant from the tip of a limb, while three unbroken packages of chewing gum, two apples and one rather dilapidated orange swung from other branches.
Stanley picked up the boy's slate. "Less' see," he asked, "what's Dummy's real name?"
"Pedro," answered Bob, busy making down their bed on the floor.
Painstaking and slowly, he wrote:
TO PEDRO
A MERRY CHRISTMAS.
YOU ARE SURE SOME SHEEP MAN.
Then he propped the slate against the tree in plain sight of the lad's eyes when he woke.