“Me wanna really one!” Cap protested inconsolably.
“Dolly! Wanna dolly!” sobbed Kitty. “Want my pop!”
“He’ll be here, never worry—anyway, by Christmas Eve!” said Martha cheerily. But in her thorough, if limited, experience of the mountains, she doubted her own hope.
Her doubts were well founded.
Over from Old Mike and the other skyline peaks to the northeast, there whirled a drifting, stinging blizzard, sifting snow, in rapid inches, not only upon the mountains, but out to the mesas and foothills, even down to the village where Cuth Jecklin had, with difficulty, finally managed to get a small advance of money for the ore he carried.
Two days before Christmas, he lashed a big sack of well-wrapped Christmas goods on behind his saddle and headed back into the mountains. But instead of making the Jaquez ranch easily on the first day, he encountered such drifts that the pony, literally, gave out, and he was compelled to leave him at a little Mexican ranch and get another, a fractious, half-broke colt that gave him no end of trouble.
The whispering darkness of a snow-stormy night was upon him before he realized it. Yet he rode on. Then suddenly the colt shied madly from a snow-hooded black stump, slipped on the steep slope, and went down. When the pony got up again, Cuth Jecklin lay stunned for a moment, a twisting pain at one of his ankles. Then, with a stifled groan, he got to his feet, mounted, and forced the horse on until they came to the Jaquez cabins.
There, with hot water and liniment for his swollen ankle, he rested for the night, hoping for the storm to stop. But toward dawn it had not, and with warm food in his stomach and a lunch in his pack, Jecklin got on his snowshoes and started on afoot, despite the protests of the ranchman.
“It’s suicide, Jecklin!” exclaimed Jaquez. “The kids will be all right without you. Wait till the storm is over!”
“Tomorrow’s Christmas, Jack,” replied Jecklin, tapping the sack he had swung to his shoulders, “but it won’t be, for them, unless I get in with this here poke of stuff. I’ll make it all right, don’t worry!”
Jaquez knew the prospector for a strong man and an experienced traveler on snowshoes, yet he shook his head doubtfully as he watched the dark shadow of his bulk fade into the dimness of dawn in the timber.
Up Bobcat Gulch, the four children watched for Pop Jecklin in vain that day, and the early twilight found all four of them near to tears. Little Martha, quaintly grown up, kept smiling, but her heart was a torment of fears. Suppose pop should be lost or frozen in the storm? Suppose—
Floundering, plodding, tumbling, a lumbering snowy hulk, Cuth Jecklin, an hour after dusk, came suddenly upon a group of shadows in the dark that he recognized as old Joe’s cabins. He bumped stumblingly against a door, calling aloud:
“McGillis! Joe McGillis!”
From inside came a snuffly, snarling voice, half plaintive in its weak fierceness.
“Who is it? What do you want?”
With slow reluctance, the door opened. “You, Jecklin? What do you want?”
“I’m done out, Joe,” answered Jecklin from the doorway. “Let me in.”
“Christmasin’, eh?” There was still a quavery sneer in the voice. “Well, I ain’t specially fond of company, but I reckon there ain’t no help for it. Come on in.”
Before the glowing fireplace, Cuth Jecklin laid down his burden, took off his snowshoes and his cumbersome wrappings, and stretched out his half-chilled body. His host offered neither conversation nor food. Even in the flickering red light of burning logs, Jecklin thought that somehow the man’s scraggly whiskered face looked more haggard, his eyes more burning and sunken than when he had seen him but a few days before. Exhausted as he was with fatigue, nevertheless, pity surged through his heart for the poor old fellow. For a while, neither spoke. Then:
“It’s Christmas Eve, Joe,” said Jecklin soberly. “I thought I could make it back to them by now. Poor little fellers, waitin’ and waitin’ over there all alone! But there ain’t a chance now. Most likely not even tomorrow, me with this ankle all blowed up. Just think of it, man; Christmas Eve, and no Santa Claus for the kids!”
“There you go, Christmasin’ around again!” grumbled the old man. “Makes me plumb sick to hear you. All bunk, I tell you! All bunk!”
The faintness of the old man’s muttering brought a pang of pity to Jecklin’s heart, even as he flushed with anger at his words. Then suddenly it came to him why old Joe had offered him no supper: he had none to offer! He was starving, and too bitterly proud to acknowledge it! For a second Jecklin hesitated, then shoved a hand into his Christmas sack, rummaged around, and brought out two packages. One was a part of the lunch Jaquez had given him. The other a bag of popcorn and candy. Silently he placed them on old Joe’s thin knees, where, for a minute, they lay untouched.
“You’d better eat some, Joe,” said Jecklin at length. “You’ll feel better.”
Tremblingly the old man obeyed, but he said no word of thanks.
Jecklin, as he fell heavily asleep on his pallet before the fire, remembered dreamily of having heard some time or other about how old Joe happened to come to the mountains: a drunken son murdering his own mother at Christmas time, old Joe, in turn, killing him. Jecklin’s recollection of the story drifted into uneasy dreaming and then, exhaustion upon him, into sleep.
Muscles that have strained and toiled in the outdoor cold all day long demand a sleep that is almost deathlike in its utter obliviousness to outside happenings. And so, with exhaustion and warmth upon him, Cuth Jecklin slumbered.
When he awoke, later, there was a chill in the room. Only a few red embers lay fading in the fireplace. White moonlight sifted in through the snow-framed window of the cabin. An eerie silence—the silence of snow-muffled mountains and frozen stars after a storm—lay over the outside world. Then, all at once, Jecklin realized that there was utter silence in the room, too. No sound of breathing, no movement in the ragged bed where old Joe should have been. No feel of human presence in the air. He sat up and looked around.
Old Joe was gone. So, too, was the sack of Christmas toys and candies. Jecklin rubbed his eyes and looked again. Perhaps old Joe had merely moved the bundle. Jecklin got up and hobbled about the room, his sore ankle stiff. Even in the shadowy moonlight he could tell that his first impression had been right. Neither old Joe nor the Christmas bag was there.
Cuth Jecklin cursed in bitter silence. What crazy thing had old Joe done now? He remembered that there were a half-dozen old mining tunnels within a few paces of the cabin, and with that remembrance came a realization of what had most likely happened: evidently the crazy old miner had stolen the Christmas sack and gone to hide it in one or another of these tunnels. Jecklin could hardly contain his anger; he wondered what he should do to the man, when he should come back to the cabin.
But old Joe did not come back. Jecklin listened in vain as he thonged his snowshoes upon his feet. When he opened the door, a crisp, edgy cold seemed fairly to slap him in the face. The storm was over, the stars and moon were out, but frost filled the air with keen-edged blades. Outside, Jecklin could see a rumpling of moonlit snow that he knew to be man-tracks leading away from the cabin.
For once, blood lust crept into his heart. If old Joe had taken his kids’ Christmas things and hidden them, or thrown them out into the snow, or wandered off insanely into the night and lost them, he would kill him. He cursed himself, too, for having slept so soundly.
Then, binding on his snowshoes, and bundled up again in sweater, jacket, and coat, he set out limpingly to follow, in the frost-glinted moonlight, the line of tracks that wabbled away from the cabin door. To his surprise, they led to no old mining tunnel. Uphill they went, great, floundering tracks, on the snow-hidden trail toward Bobcat Gulch. With a strange, wondering fear in his heart, Cuth Jecklin followed. His ankle throbbed with