So when the last of the horse stock was branded and the work was drawing to a close, as we sat around the fireplace one night and the question came up where each of us expected to spend Christmas, I broached my plan.  The master and mistress were expected at the Booth ranch on the Frio.  Nearly all the boys, who had homes within two or three days’ ride, hoped to improve the chance to make a short visit to their people.  When, among the others, I also made my application for leave of absence, Uncle Lance turned in his chair with apparent surprise.  “What’s that?  You want to go home?  Well, now, that’s a new one on me.  Why, Tom, I never knew you had any folks; I got the idea, somehow, that you was won on a horse race.  Here I had everything figured out to send you down to Santa Maria with Enrique.  But I reckon with the ice broken, he’ll have to swim out or drown.  Where do your folks live?” I explained that they lived on the San Antonio River, northeast about one hundred and fifty miles.  At this I saw my employer’s face brighten.  “Yes, yes, I see,” said he musingly; “that will carry you past the widow McLeod’s.  You can go, son, and good luck to you.”

I timed my departure from Las Palomas, allowing three days for the trip, so as to reach home on Christmas eve.  By making a slight deviation, there was a country store which I could pass on the last day, where I expected to buy some presents for my mother and sisters.  But I was in a pickle as to what to give Esther, and on consulting Miss Jean, I found that motherly elder sister had everything thought out in advance.  There was an old Mexican woman, a pure Aztec Indian, at a ranchita belonging to Las Palomas, who was an expert in Mexican drawn work.  The mistress of the home ranch had been a good patron of this old woman, and the next morning we drove over to the ranchita, where I secured half a dozen ladies’ handkerchiefs, inexpensive but very rare.

I owned a private horse, which had run idle all summer, and naturally expected to ride him on this trip.  But Uncle Lance evidently wanted me to make a good impression on the widow McLeod, and brushed my plans aside, by asking me as a favor to ride a certain black horse belonging to his private string.  “Quirk,” said he, the evening before my departure, “I wish you would ride Wolf, that black six-year-old in my mount.  When that rascal of an Enrique saddle-broke him for me, he always mounted him with a free head and on the move, and now when I use him he’s always on the fidget.  So you just ride him over to the San Antonio and back, and see if you can’t cure him of that restlessness.  It may be my years, but I just despise a horse that’s always dancing a jig when I want to mount him.”