Chapter 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 aërial 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.