Scott was a spare, muscular fellow, good-looking, but with a face so set and dark that I used to think it very like the castings he sold. He was taciturn and domineering, and Nell rather liked to provoke him. Her father was so easy with her that she seemed to enjoy being ordered about now and then. That night, when every one was praising her and telling her how well she sang and how pretty she looked, Scott only said, as we came out of the dressing-room:
“Have you got your high shoes on?”
“No; but I’ve got rubbers on over my low ones. Mother doesn’t care.”
“Well, you just go back and put ’em on as fast as you can.”
Nell made a face at him and ran back, laughing. Her mother, fat, comfortable Mrs. Deane, was immensely amused at this.
“That’s right, Scott,” she chuckled. “You can do enough more with her than I can. She walks right over me an’ Jud.”
Scott grinned. If he was proud of Nelly, the last thing he wished to do was to show it. When she came back he began to nag again. “What are you going to do with all those flowers? They’ll freeze stiff as pokers.”
“Well, there won’t none of your flowers freeze, Scott Spinny, so there!” Nell snapped. She had the best of him that time, and the Assyrian youths rejoiced. They were most of them high-school boys, and the poorest of them had “chipped in” and sent all the way to Denver for Queen Esther’s flowers. There were bouquets from half a dozen townspeople, too, but none from Scott. Scott was a prosperous hardware merchant and notoriously penurious, though he saved his face, as the boys said, by giving liberally to the church.
“There’s no use freezing the fool things, anyhow. You get me some newspapers, and I’ll wrap ’em up.” Scott took from his pocket a folded copy of the Riverbend “Messenger” and began laboriously to wrap up one of the bouquets. When we left the church door he bore three large newspaper bundles, carrying them as carefully as if they had been so many newly frosted wedding-cakes, and left Nell and me to shift for ourselves as we floundered along the snow-burdened sidewalk.
Although it was after midnight, lights were shining from many of the little wooden houses, and the roofs and shrubbery were so deep in snow that Riverbend looked as if it had been tucked down into a warm bed. The companies of people, all coming from church, tramping this way and that toward their homes and calling “Good night” and “Merry Christmas” as they parted company, all seemed to us very unusual and exciting.