Then finally Keno came, downcast, pale, and worried.

“The little feller’s awful sick,” he said.  “I guess he can’t come to the tree.”

His statement was greeted in silence.

“Then, maybe he’ll see it to-morrow,” said the blacksmith, after a moment.  “It wouldn’t make so very much odds to us old cusses.  Christmas is for kids, of course.  So we’ll leave her standing jest as she is.”

Slowly they gave up their final hopes.  Slowly they all went out in the storm and night, shutting the door on the Christmas celebration now abandoned to darkness, the creak of the hinges, the long line of snow inside that pointed to the tree.

One by one they bade good-night to Webber, the smith, and so went home to many a cold little cabin, seemingly hunched like a freezing thing in the driving storm.

CHAPTER XIV

“If only I had the resolution”

For the next three or four days the tiny bit of a man at Miss Doc’s seemed neither to be worse nor better of his ailment.  The hand of lethargy lay with dulling weight upon him.  Old Jim and Miss Dennihan were baffled, though their tenderness increased and their old animosity disappeared, forgotten in the stress of care.

That the sister of Doc could develop such a spirit of motherhood astounded nearly every man in the camp.  Accustomed to acerbities of criticism for their many shortcomings from her ever-pointed tongue, they marvelled the more at her semi-partnership with Jim, whom of all the population of the town she had scorned and verbally castigated most frequently.

Resupplying their tree with candles, the patient fellows had kept alive their hope of a great day of joy and celebration, only to see it steadily receding from their view.  At length they decided to carry their presents to the house where the wan little foundling lay, trusting the sight of their labors of love might cheer him to recovery.

To the utter amazement of her brother, Miss Doc not only permitted the big, rough men to track the snow through her house, when they came with their gifts, but she gave them kindly welcome.  In her face that day they readily saw some faint, illusive sign of beauty heretofore unnoticed, or perhaps concealed.

“He’ll come along all right,” she told them, with a smile they found to be singularly sweet, “for Jim do seem a comfort to the poor little thing.”

Old Jim would surely have been glad to believe that he or anything supplied a comfort to the grave little sick man lying so quietly in bed.  The miner sat by him all day long, and far into every night, only climbing to his cabin on the hill when necessity drove him away.  Then he was back there in the morning by daylight, eager, but cheerful always.

The presents were heaped on the floor in sight of the pale little Skeezucks, who clung unfailingly, through it all, to the funny makeshift of a doll that “Bruvver Jim” had placed in his keeping.  He appeared not at all to comprehend the meaning of the gifts the men had brought, or to know their purpose.  That never a genuinely happy Christmas had brightened his little, mysterious life, Miss Dennihan knew by a swift, keen process of womanly intuition.