"Don't you know Mr. Bucket?" said Johnny. "He keeps that grocery on
Hill Street. He gave me the box I made this old thing out of."
"Oh," said Tommy's father, and turned and looked the sled over again.
"What was the matter with your cow?" asked Tommy.
"Broke her leg--right here," and Johnny pulled up his trousers and
showed just where the leg was broken below the knee. "The doctor said
she must be killed, and so she was; but Mr. Bucket said he could have
saved her if the 'Siety would've let him. He'd 'a just swung her up
until she got well."
"How?" asked Tommy, much interested.
"What Society?" asked his father.
Johnny answered the last question first. "'Pervention of Cruelty,'" he
said, shortly.
"Oh," said Tommy's father.
"I know how she broke her leg," said Johnny.
"How did she break her leg?" inquired Tommy.
"A boy done it. I know him and I know he done it, and some day I'm
going to catch him when he ain't looking for me."
"You have not had a cow since?" inquired Tommy's father. "Then you do
not have to go and drive her up and milk her when the weather is
cold?"
"Oh, I would not mind that," said Johnny cheerily. "I'd drive her up
if the weather was as cold as Greenland, and milk her, too, so I had
her. I used to love to feed her and I didn't mind carryin' milk
around; for I used to get money for it for my mother to buy things
with; but now, since that boy broke her leg and the 'Siety killed
her----"
He did not say what there was since; he just stopped talking and
presently Tommy's father said: "You do not have so much money since?"
"No, sir!" said Johnny, "and my mother has to work a heap harder, you
see."
"And you work too?"
"Some," said Johnny. "I sell papers and clean off the sidewalk when
there is snow to clean off, and run errands for Mr. Bucket and do a
few things. Well, I've got to go along," he added, "I've got some
things to do now. I was just trying this old sled over on the hill to
see how she would go. I've got some work to do now"; and he trotted
off, whistling and dragging his sled behind him.
As Tommy and his father turned into their grounds, his father asked,
"Where did he say he lived?"
"Wait, I'll show you," said Tommy, proud of his knowledge. "Down there
[pointing]. See that little house down in the bottom, away over beyond
the cow-pasture?"
"How do you know he lives there?"
"Because I've been there. He's got goats," said Tommy, "and he let me
drive them. I wish I had some goats. I wish Santa Claus would bring me
two goats like Johnny's."
"Which would you rather have? Goats or a cow?" asked his father.
"Goats," said Tommy, promptly.
"I wonder if Johnny would!" laughed his father.
"Father, where is Greenland?" said Tommy, presently.
"A country away up at the North--away up in that direction." His
father pointed far across the cow-pasture, which lay shining in the
evening light. "I must show it to you on the map."
"Is it very cold there?" asked Tommy.
"Very cold in winter."
"Colder than this?"
"Oh, yes, because it is so far north that the sun never gets up in
winter to warm it, and away up there the winter is just one long night
and the summer one long day."
"Why, that's where Santa Claus comes from," said Tommy. "Do people
live up there?"
"People called Eskimos," said his father, "who live by fishing and
hunting."
"Tell me about them," said Tommy. "What do they hunt?"
"Bears," said his father, "polar bears--and walrus--and seals--and----"
"Oh, tell me about them," said Tommy, eagerly.
So, as they walked along, his father told him of the strange little,
flat-faced people, who live all winter in houses made of ice and snow
and hunted on the ice-floes for polar bears and seals and walrus, and
in the summer got in their little kiaks and paddled around, hunting
for seals and walrus with their arrows and harpoons, on the "pans" or
smooth ice, where every family of "harps" or seals have their own
private door, gnawed down through the ice with their teeth.
"I wish I could go there," said Tommy, his eyes gazing across the
long, white glistening fields with the dark border of the woodland
beyond and the rich saffron of the winter sky above the tree-tops
stretching across in a border below the steelly white of the upper
heavens.
"What would you do?" asked his father.
"Hunt polar bears," said Tommy promptly. "I'd get one most as big as
the library, so mother could give you the skin; because I heard her
say she would like to have one in front of the library fire, and the
only way she could get one would be to give it to you for Christmas."