We didn't tell my father of the adventure of the night, but somehow from that hour we felt sworn friends, and I never received again from Worthing the cold chaff which made him so feared and hated at Rancey Bridge. He visited several times at Sunset Towers, and my father was loud in his praises. He considered him a sane, level-headed fellow, just the kind of friend to have behind one. But it didn't seem to me that Worthing felt the same esteem for my father, and this was perhaps the one shadow on our friendship. And even I, watching the two, realized how my father needed such a friend himself. Then the Christmas holidays came, and all except a few of the boarders went home for the vacation. CHAPTER X MY FATHER TELLS A STORY Christmas was soon upon us; and waking in the morning I felt eagerly in my stocking, and was delighted beyond measure to find a bright new pistol, a long-coveted treasure. I was up and dressed in no time, and out into the frozen air. I soon had a target set up, and regardless of numbed fingers put to proof the steadiness of my hand and eye; till my father came out and dragged me unwillingly to breakfast, extracting from me the promise to put away the deadly weapon till next day, for there were a few boys left at Rancey Bridge over the holidays, and they were to come and spend Christmas with me. My father didn't want any accidents. It was a cold clear day, and the ground lay a few inches deep in snow. We had an uproarious time, and ate a magnificent dinner; and in the evening we gathered round the dining-room fire to hear my father tell a story before it was time for my friends to tramp back to the school. Now I was considered something of a story-teller at Rancey Bridge, but I had always insisted that I was a mere stuttering dummy to my father; so the excitement was intense as we gathered before the leaping flames, the only light in the room, and waited for my father to begin. He was sitting back half in shadow, with the red glow of the fire lighting his cheeks in swarthy leaps of colour, till his face seemed alternately to spring at us out of the darkness and sink back into the dusk beyond. I can't give all his story, for he kept us there two hours or more; and his words without his accent, always so hushed and tense, as though he were in the very presence of the things he was describing, would convey little of the impression he made upon us. For he took us right away from the life we knew, and we were afloat with a band of adventurers on the Spanish Main, with our schooner nosing out to El Dorado far across the sea.