With a queer sound that might have been a cough, a sob, or a chuckle, the child grasped his hand, and together they hurried around the tank, where the old man, addressing himself vigorously to the task, soon had the thick ice which covered it broken up until only one great cake rode in the middle. Then he set Hilda—who was laughing joyously as she looked on and applauded—across the tank from him, provided with a long pole to push the big ice-cake toward him, and smashed it also. The poor thirsty cattle, who had followed trustingly close at their heels, crowded up to drink; and when Santa Claus and Kris Kringle reached the ranchhouse door they could look back and see the happy Bar Thirteens clustered around their Christmas tree, “taking off the presents,” as Hilda said. “And, oh, Uncle Hank,” squeezing his hand hard between her two little ones, “isn’t it—just—beautiful!” Supper found the little kitchen bare of any object suspicious to the eye (even the eye very, very big, very black, and preposterously keen, of eight years old), but in the air still hung a noble aroma, and Lily, the white cat, paced up and down, mewing now and then, rubbing against old Hank’s legs, and stopping to sniff most indelicately at the pantry door. Hilda giggled—or would it be more exact to say that a giggle rippled its way from the little girl’s abashed and apologetic throat—when the old man spoke reproachfully: “You, Lily! I’m plumb outdone with you. Don’t I tell you they ain’t no mice in there—leastways none that you could ketch?” The meal went off amid a sort of eccentric joviality, which was liable to blossom into open hilarity with no particular cause apparent; indeed, joy bubbled so hard that there seemed perpetual danger of a wholesale eruption. “’Spect you better go to bed right soon,” the old man cautioned. “And don’t forget to hang up a good long stocking.” “Why, Uncle Hank, do you believe Santa Claus can get down a stove pipe?” gurgled Hilda in an ecstasy of delight. “Sure!” replied the old man gravely, but with twinkling eye. “He knows many a way to get in where the stocking is—that draws him, as you might say.” Together they unearthed from big Frosty MacQueen’s kit an amazing and Brobdingnagian pair of golf hose. “These was sure made for this business,” murmured Hank in chuckling enjoyment, as he gazed upon them. He helped the little girl fasten one of the great, gayly plaided things to the wall behind the stove, all the time muttering delighted comments upon their size and the cheerfulness of their color scheme. “Well, now, you hang up the other one for your own self,” suddenly urged Hilda, though she looked a little doubtfully at its capaciousness. “Huh?” exclaimed the old man, facing around upon her. “Don’t you reckon Sandy Claus would get sort of mixed up by me being at the Bar Thirteen, when I ought, speaking proper and by the book to be at Mesquite—or to home at the Three Sorrers ranch house?”