I
Hetherington wasn't half a bad sort of a fellow, but he had his
peculiarities, most of which were the natural defects of a lack of
imagination. He didn't believe in ghosts, or Santa Claus, or any of the
thousands of other things that he hadn't seen with his own eyes, and as
he walked home that rather chilly afternoon just before Christmas and
found nearly every corner of the highway decorated with bogus Saints,
wearing the shoddy regalia of Kris-Kringle, the sight made him a trifle
irritable. He had had a fairly good luncheon that day, one indeed that
ought to have mellowed his disposition materially, but which somehow or
other had not so resulted. In fact, Hetherington was in a state of raspy
petulance that boded ill for his digestion, and when he had reached the
corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, the constant iteration
and reiteration of these shivering figures of the god of the Yule had
got on his nerves to such an extent as to make him aggressively
quarrelsome. He had controlled the asperities of his soul tolerably well
on the way uptown, but the remark of a small child on the highway, made
to a hurrying mother, as they passed a stalwart-looking replica of the
idol of his Christmas dreams, banging away on a tambourine to attract
attention to the iron pot before him, placed there to catch the pennies
of the charitably inclined wayfarer--"Oh, mar, there's Sandy Claus
now!"--was too much for him.
"Tush! Nonsense!" ejaculated Hetherington, glowering at the shivering
figure in the turkey-red robe. "The idea of filling children's minds up
with such balderdash! Santa Claus, indeed! There isn't a genuine Santa
Claus in the whole bogus bunch."
The Saint on the corner banged his tambourine just under Hetherington's
ear with just enough force to jar loose the accumulated irascibility of
the well-fed gentleman.
"This is a fine job for an able-bodied man like you!" said Hetherington
with a sneer. "Why don't you go to work instead of helping to perpetuate
this annual fake?"
The Saint looked at him for a moment before replying.
"Speakin' to me?" he said.
"Yes. I'm speaking to you," said Hetherington. "Here's the whole country
perishing for the lack of labor, and in spite of that fact this town has
broken out into a veritable rash of fake Santa Clauses--"
"That'll do for you!" retorted Santa Claus. "It's easy enough for a
feller with a stomach full o' victuals and plenty of warm clothes on
his back to jump on a hard-workin' feller like me--"
"Hard-working?" echoed Hetherington. "I like that! You don't call
loafing on a street corner this way all day long hard work, do you?"
He rather liked the man's spirit, despite his objection to his
occupation.
"Suppose you try it once and find out," retorted Santa Claus, blowing on
his bluish fingers in an effort to restore their clogged-up circulation.
"I guess if you tried a job like this just once, standin' out in the
cold from eight in the mornin' to ten at night, with nothin' but a cup
o' coffee and a ham-sandwich inside o' you--"
"What's that?" cried Hetherington, aghast. "Is that all you've had to
eat to-day?"
"That's all," said the Saint, as he turned to his work with the
tambourine. "Try it once, mister, and maybe you won't feel so cock-sure
about its not bein' work. If you're half the sport you think you are
just take my place for a couple of hours."
An appeal to his sporting instinct was never lost on Hetherington.
"By George!" he cried. "I'll go you. I'll swap coats with you, and while
you're filling your stomach up I'll take your place, all right."
"What'll I fill me stomach up with?" demanded the man. "I don't look
like a feller with a meal-ticket in his pocket, do I?"
"I'll take care of that," said Hetherington, taking out a roll of bills
and peeling off a two-dollar note from the outside. "There--you take
that and blow yourself, and I'll take care of the kitty here till you
come back."
The exchange of externals was not long in accomplishment. The gathering
of the shadows of night made it a comparatively easy matter to arrange
behind a conveniently stalled and heavily laden express wagon hard by,
and in a few moments the irascible but still "sporty" Hetherington, who
from childhood up to the present had never been able to take a dare,
found himself banging away on a tambourine and incidentally shivering in
the poor red habiliments of a fraudulent Saint. For a half-hour the
novelty of his position gave him a certain thrill, and no Santa Claus in
town that night fulfilled his duties more vociferously than did
Hetherington; but as time passed on, and the chill of a windy corner
began to penetrate his bones, to say nothing of the frosty condition of
his ears, which his false cotton whiskers but indifferently protected,
he began to tire of his bargain.
"Gosh!" he muttered to himself, as it began to snow, and certain passing
truckmen hurled the same kind of guying comments at him as had been more
or less in his mind whenever he had passed a fellow-Santa-Claus on his
way up-town, "if General Sherman were here he'd find a twin-brother to
War! I wish that cuss would come back."
He gazed eagerly up and down the street in the hope that the departed
original would heave in sight, but in vain. A two-dollar meal evidently
possessed attractions that he wished to linger over.
"Can't stand this much longer!" he muttered to himself, and then his eye
caught sight of a group that filled his soul with dismay: two policemen
and the struggling figure of one who appeared to have looked not wisely
but too well upon the cup that cheers, the latter wearing Hetherington's
overcoat and Hetherington's hat, but whose knees worked upon hinges of
their own, double-back-action hinges that made his legs of no use
whatsoever, either to himself or to anybody else.
"Hi there!" Hetherington cried out, as the group passed up the street on
the way to the station-house. "That fellow's got my overcoat--"
But the only reply Hetherington got was a sturdy poke in the ribs from
the night-stick of the passing officer.
"Well, I'll be jiggered!" growled Hetherington.