I
Around the little log cabin in the clearing the snow lay nearly four
feet deep. It loaded the roof. It buried the low, broad, log barn
almost to the eaves. It whitely fenced in the trodden, chip-littered,
straw-strewn space of the yard which lay between the barn and the
cabin. It heaped itself fantastically, in mounds and domes and
pillars, over the stumps that dotted the raw, young clearing. It clung
densely on the drooping branches of the fir and spruce and hemlock. It
mantled in a kind of breathless, expectant silence the solitude of the
wilderness world.
Dave Patton, pushing down the blankets and the many-coloured patchwork
quilt, lifted himself on one elbow and looked at the pale face of his
young wife. She was sleeping. He slipped noiselessly out of the bunk,
lightly pulled up the coverings again, and hurriedly drew on two pairs
of heavy, home-knit socks of rough wool. The cabin was filled with the
grey light of earliest dawn, and with a biting cold that made the
woodsman's hardy fingers ache. Stepping softly as a cat over the rude
plank floor, he made haste to pile the cooking-stove with birch-bark,
kindling, and split sticks of dry, hard wood. At the touch of the
match the birch-bark caught and curled with a crisp crackling, and
with a roar in the strong draught the cunningly piled mass burst into
blaze. Dave Patton straightened, and his grey eyes turned to a little,
low bunk with high sides in the farther corner of the cabin.
Peering over the edge of the bunk with big, eager, blue eyes, was a
round little face framed in a tousled mop of yellow hair. A red glare
from the open draught of the stove caught the child's face. The moment
she saw her father looking at her she started to climb out of the
bunk; but Dave was instantly at her side, kissing her and tucking her
down again into the blankets.
"You mustn't git out o' bed, sweetie," he whispered, "till the house
gits warmed up a bit. An' don't wake mother yet."
The child's eyes danced with eagerness, but she restrained her voice
as she replied.
"I thought mebbe 'twas Christmis, popsie!" she whispered, catching his
fingers. "'T first, I thought mebbe you was Sandy Claus, popsie. Oh, I
wish Christmis 'ld hurry up!"
A look of pain passed over Dave Patton's face.
"Christmas won't be along fer 'most a week yit, sweetie!" he answered,
in the soft undertone that took heed of his wife's slumbers. "An'
anyways, how do you s'pose Sandy Claus is goin' to find his way, 'way
out into these great woods, through all this snow?"
"Oh, _popsie!_" cried the child, excitedly. Then, remembering, she
lowered her voice again to a whisper. "Don't you know Sandy Claus kin
go _any_wheres? Snow, an' cold, an' the--the--the big, black
woods--they don't bother _him_ one little, teenty mite. He knows where
to find me out here, jest's easy's in at the Settlements, popsie!"
The mother stirred in her bunk, wakened by the little one's voice. She
sat up, shivering, and pulled a red shawl about her shoulders. Her
eyes sought Dave's significantly and sympathetically.
"Mother's girl must try an' not think so much about Sandy Claus," she
pleaded. "I don't want her to go an' be disappointed. Sandy Claus
lives in at the Settlements, an' you know right well, girlie, he
couldn't git 'way out here, Christmas Eve, without neglecting all the
little boys an' girls at the Settlements. You wouldn't want _them all_
disappointed, just so's he could come to our little girl 'way off here
in the woods, what's got her father an' mother anyways!"
The child sat up straight in her bunk, her eyes grew very wide and
filled with tears, and her lips quivered. This was the first really
effective blow that her faith in Christmas and in Santa Claus had ever
received. But instantly her faith recovered itself. The eager light
returned to her face, and she shook her yellow head obstinately.
"He won't _have to_ 'lect the children in the Settlements, will he,
popsie?" she cried. And without waiting for an answer, she went on:
"He kin be everywheres to oncet, Sandy Claus can. He's so good an'
kind, he won't forget _one_ of the little boys an' girls in the
Settlements, nor me, out here in the woods. Oh, mumsie, I wisht it was
to-night was Christmas Eve!" And in her happy anticipation she bounced
up and down in the bunk, a figure of fairy joy in her blue flannel
nightgown.
Dave turned away with a heavy heart and jammed more wood into the
stove. Then, pulling on his thick cowhide "larrigans," coat and
woollen mittens, he went out to fodder the cattle. With that joyous
roar of fresh flame in the stove the cabin was already warming up, but
outside the door, which Dave closed quickly behind him, the cold had a
kind of still savagery, edged and instant like a knife. To a strong
man, however, it was a tonic, an honest challenging to resistance. In
spite of his sad preoccupation, Dave responded to the cold air
instinctively, pausing outside the door to fill his deep lungs and to
glance at the thrilling mystery of the sunrise before him.
The cabin stood at the top of the clearing against a background of
dense spruce forest which sheltered it on the north and north-east.
Across the yard, on the western side of the cabin, the log barn and
the "lean-to" thrust up their laden roofs from the surrounding snow.
In front, the cleared ground sloped away gently to the woods below, a
snow-swathed, mystically glimmering expanse, its surface tumbled by
the upthrust of the muffled stumps. From the eastern corner of the
clearing, directly opposite the doorway before which Dave was
standing, the Settlements trail led straight away, a lane of
miraculous glory, into the very focus of the sunrise.
For miles upon miles the slow slope of the wilderness was towards the
east, so that the trail was like an open gate into the great space of
earth and sky. The sky, from the eastern horizon to the zenith--and
that was all that Dave Patton had eyes for--was filled with a
celestial rabble of rose-pink vapours, thin aerial wisps of almost
unimaginable colour. Except the horizon! The horizon, just where the
magic portals of the trail revealed it, was an unfathomable radiance
of intense, transparent, orange-crimson flame, so thrilling in its
strangeness that Dave seemed to feel his spirit striving to draw it in
as his lungs were drawing in the vital air. From that fount of living
light rushed innumerable streams of thin colour, making threads and
stains and patches of mystical red among the tops of the lower forest,
and dyeing the snowy surface of the clearing with the tints of
mother-of-pearl and opal. Dave turned his head to glance at the cabin,
the barn, and the woods behind them. All were bathed in that
transfiguring rush of glory. The beauty of it gave him a curious pang,
which turned instantly, by some association too obscure for him to
trace, into an ache of grief at the disappointment that was hanging
over his little one's gaily trusting heart. The fairylike quality of
the scene before him made him think, by a mingling of sympathy and
far-off, dim remembrance, of the fairy glamour and unreal radiance of
beauty that Christmas tree and Christmas toys stood for in the child's
bright anticipations. He reminded himself of the glittering delights
with which, during the past three Christmases, Lidey's kinsfolk in the
Settlement had lovingly surrounded her. Now he, her father, could do
nothing to make her Christmas different from all these other days of
whose shut-in monotony she was wearying. Hope, now, and excited wonder
were giving the little one new life. Dave Patton cringed within at the
thought of the awakening, the disillusionment, the desolation of
sorrow that would come to the baby heart with the dawn of Christmas.
He was overwhelmed with self-reproach, because he had not realized all
this in time to make provision, before the deep snow had blocked the
trail to the Settlement. Now, what _could_ he do?
Heavily Dave strode across the yard to the door of the barn. At the
sound of his feet crunching the trodden and brittle snow, there came
low mooings of eagerness from the expectant cattle in the barn. As he
lifted the massive wooden latch and opened the door, the horse
whinnied to him from the innermost stall, there was a welcoming
shuffle of hoofs, and a comfortable warmth puffed steamily out in his
face. From the horse's stall, from the stanchions of the cattle, big,
soft eyes all turned to him. As he bundled the scented hay into the
mangers, and listened to the contented snortings and puffings as soft
muzzles tossed the fodder, he thought how happy these creatures were
in their warm security. He thought how happy he was, and his wife,
reunited to him after three years of forced and almost continuous
separation. For him, and for the young wife, now recovering health in
the tonic air of the spruce land after years of invalidism, this had
promised to be a Christmas of unalloyed gladness. To one only, to the
little one whose happiness was his continual thought, the day would be
dark with the shattering of cherished hopes. The more he thought of
it, the more he felt that it was not to be borne. Faint but piteous
memories from his own childhood stirred in his brain, and he realized
how irremediable, how final and desperate, seem a child's small
sorrows. A sudden resolve took hold upon him. This bitterness, at
least, his little one should not know. He jammed the pitchfork
energetically back into the mow and left the barn with the quick step
of an assured purpose.
Three years before this, Dave Patton, after a series of misfortunes in
the Settlement, which had reduced him to sharp poverty, had been
forced to leave his wife and three-years-old baby with her own people,
while he betook himself into the remotest wilderness to carve out a
new home for them on a tract of forest land which was all that
remained of his possessions. The land was fertile and carried good
timber, and he had begun to prosper. But his wife's ill-health had
long made it impossible for her to face the hardships and risks of a
pioneer's life two days' journey from the nearest civilization. Not
till the preceding spring had Dave dared to bring his family out to
the wilderness home that he had so long been making ready for them.
Then, however, it had proved a success. In that high and healing air
he had seen the colour slowly come back to his wife's pale cheeks; and
as for the child, until the great snows came and cut her off from this
novel and interesting world, she had been absorbingly happy in the
fellowship of the wilderness.
When Dave re-entered the cabin, he found the table set over by the
window, and his wife beating up the batter for the buckwheat pancakes
that she was about to griddle for breakfast. Lidey, still in her
little blue flannel nightgown, but with beaded deerskin moccasins on
her tiny feet, and the golden wilfulness of her hair tied back
demurely with a blue ribbon, was seated at one end of the table, her
eager face half buried in a sheet of paper. She was laboriously
inditing, for perhaps the twentieth time, an epistle to "Sandy Claus,"
telling him what she hoped he would bring her.
If anything had been needed to confirm Dave Patton in his resolve, it
was this. From the rapt child his eyes turned and met his wife's
inquiring glance.
"I reckon I've got to go, Mary!" he said quietly. "Think you two kin
git along all right fer four or five days? We ain't likely to have no
more snow this moon."
The woman let a little sigh escape her, but the look she gave her
husband was one of cheerful acquiescence.
"I guess you're right, dear! I'll have to let you go, though five days
seems an awful long time to be alone here. I've been thinkin' it
over," she continued, guarding her words so that Lidey should not
understand--"an' I just couldn't bear to see it, Dave!"
"That's so!" assented the man. "I'll leave heaps o' wood an' kindlin'
cut, an' you'll jest have to milk an' look after the beasts, dear.
Long's you're not _scairt_ to be alone, it's all right, I reckon!"
"When'll you start?" asked the wife, turning to pour the batter in
little, sputtering, grey-white circles on to the hot, greased
griddle.
"First thing to-morrow mornin'!" answered Dave, seating himself at the
table as the appetizing smell of the browning pancakes filled the
room. "Snow's jest right for snowshoein', an' I'll git back easy
Christmas Eve."
"You sure won't be late, popsie?" interrupted the child, looking up
with apprehension in her round eyes. "I jest wouldn't care one mite
for Sandy Claus if you weren't here too!"
"Mebbe I'll git him to give me a lift in his little sleigh! Anyways,
I'll be back!" laughed Dave, gaily.