that no one noticed for a moment that the door was ajar. A black-bearded man in a rough overcoat was examining a row of dolls which dangled by their necks from a line above the show-case. He was saying joking!
“Well, Mrs. Neal, I’ll have to be buying some of these gimcracks before long. If this mud keeps up, no reindeer living could get out to my place, and it would n’t do for the young uns to be disappointed Christmas morning.”
Then he caught sight of a section of a small boy peeping through the door, for all that showed of Will’m through the crack was a narrow strip of blue overalls, which covered him from neck to knees, a round pink cheek, and one solemn eye peering out from under his thatch of straight flaxen hair like a little Skye terrier’s, When the man saw that eye, he hurried to say, “Of course mud ought n’t to make any difference to Santy’s reindeer. They take the sky road, right over the housetops and all.”
The crack widened till two eyes peeped in, shining with interest, and both stubby shoes ventured over the threshold. A familiar sniffle made Grandma Neal turn around.
“Go back to the fire, William,” she said briskly. “It isn’t warm enough in here for you with that cold of yours.”
The order was obeyed as promptly as it was given, but with a bang of the door so rebellious and unexpected that the man laughed. There was an amused expression on the woman’s face too, as she glanced up from the package she was trying to explain with an indulgent smile:
“That was n’t all temper, Mr. Woods. It was part embarrassment that made him slam the door. Usually he does n’t mind strangers, but he takes spells like that sometimes.”
“That ’s only natural,” was the drawling answer. “But it is n’t everybody who knows how to manage children, Mrs. Neal. I hope, now, that his stepmother, when he gets her, will understand him as well as you do. My wife tells me that the poor little kids are going to have one soon. How do they take to the notion?”
Mrs. Neal stiffened a little at the question, although he was an old friend, and his interest was natural under the circumstances. There was a slight pause, then she said:
“I have n’t mentioned the subject to them yet. No use to make them cross their bridge before they get to it. I’ve no doubt Molly will be good to them. She was a nice little thing when she used to go to school here at the Junction.”
“It ’s queer,” mused the man, “how she and Bill Branfield used to think so much of each other, from their First Reader days, till both families moved away from here, and then that they should come across each other after all these years, from different States, too.”
Instinctively they had lowered their voices, but Will’m, on the other side of the closed door, was making too much noise of his own to hear anything they were saying. Lying full-length on the rug in front of the fire, he battered his heels up and down on the floor and pouted. His cold made him miserable, and being sent out of the shop made him cross. If he had been allowed to stay, there ’s no telling what he might have heard about those reindeer to repeat to Libby when she came home from school.
Suddenly Will’m remembered the last bit of information which she had brought home to him, and scrambling hastily up from the floor, he climbed into the rocking-chair as if something were after him:
“Santa Claus is apt to be looking down the chimney any minute to see how you ’re behaving, And no matter if your lips don’t show it outside, he knows when you ’re all puckered up with crossness and pouting on the inside!”
At that terrible thought Will’m began to rock violently back and forth and sing. It was a choky, sniffling little tune that he sang. His voice sounded thin and far away even to his own ears, because his cold was so bad. But the thought that Santa might be listening, and would write him down as a good little boy, kept him valiantly at it for several minutes. Then because he had a way of chanting his thoughts out loud sometimes, instead of thinking them to himself, he went on, half chanting, half talking the story of the camels and the star, which he was waiting for Grandma Neal to come back and finish. He knew it as well as she did, because she had told it to him so often in the last week.
“An‘ the wise men rode through the night, an’ they rode and they rode, an’ the bells on the bridles went ting-a-ling! just like the bell on Dranma’s shop door, An’ the drate big star shined down on them, and went ahead to show ’em the way, An’ the drate big reindeer runned along the sky road”—he was mixing Grandma Neal’s story now with what he had heard through the crack in the door, and he found the mixture much more thrilling than the original recital. “An’ they runned an’ they runned, an’ the sleigh-bells went ting-a-ling! just like the bell on Dranma’s shop door. An’ after a long time, they all comed to the house where the baby king was at. Nen the wise men jumped off their camels and knelt down and opened all their boxes of pretty things for him to play with. An’ the reindeer knelt down on the roof where the drate big