with Mrs. William, and in the morning, if I don’t freeze myself gettin’ home, I ’ll fetch you, still.”
“I ’ll take her myself,” said the man, cordially.
“Then I ’ll be leavin’ the Christmas tricks for herself to carry along,” said Frau Metzger, depositing the fruit on the kitchen table.
“Was it Christmas buyin’ as took the child out?”
“Ay, and such riches, you ’d never count ’em.” Then, as she warmed her feet in the oven and drank the hot tea prepared for her, Mrs. Metzger told Crazy Bill and his wife of the Christmas that was in prospect for the children at Lonesome Ranch. “And never a thought for herself, mind ye. She ’s forty, if she’s a day, the little old mother.”
Just before leaving, kind old Frau Metzger, with her basket on her arm and wrapped in a great blanket cloak, went into the room where Mary Ellen was by this time sleeping and bent over the cot. She thought of another little girl of long ago, back in Germany, and her kind old heart went out to this lonesome American child. Impulsively she drew from her basket a doll that had been intended for little Charlie, and was about to lay it on the coarse straw pillow. “But no,” she said to herself; “it's only one day; it would only spoil Charlie’s Christmas surprise, and I have something better for her at home”; so she returned it to her basket and tiptoed out of the room.
“When he opened the door a small mountain spruce fell forward into the room.”
The next morning Mary Ellen was set down, safe and sound, at her father’s door, and loiterers about the depot in La Junta noticed Crazy Bill as he boarded the evening train.
“A little tip to Denver for my health,” was the answer he gave his cow-boy friends.
Fortune favored Mary Ellen with sunny days,