From the windows of the Widow Miller's cabin the whole world seemed wrapped in a mantle of white. Down along the creek in the meadow the rose bushes and willows poked their heads above the snow. Changing their skirts for overalls, she and Nancy soon picked a couple of quarts of the brilliant red berries or fruit of the rose bushes. That night as soon as the children were safely in bed they started in on their Christmas tree preparations. Several days before Nancy had slipped out into the timber and cut a small spruce which she dragged to the stable and hid under some loose hay, and with an empty canned goods case and some stones they managed to make a very satisfactory base for it. Over the coals in the fireplace they popped a huge dish-pan full of corn and worked late into the night stringing popcorn and the rose berries with which to festoon the tree. "I've seen my mother use cranberries for the same thing," she told her sister, "but these rose berries look quite as well I think." From the pages of a mail order catalogue they cut figures from the brilliantly colored fashion plates which, pasted upon stiff cardboard and hung to the tips of the branches, made famous decorations. Festooned with the long strings of rose berries and popcorn, with these gaily painted ladies of fashion dangling from every bough, it made a very satisfactory Christmas tree. After placing upon it the presents for the children which they had been able to buy or make, together with a few apples and oranges, some stick candy, each done up separately in paper, "just to make it seem more," Nancy said, the two women retired for the night. How long she had slept or what awakened her, Mrs. Miller could not tell, but as she strained her ears for the slightest sound, she imagined she could hear outside the footfalls of some heavy animal. She knew it could be no bear, for whatever it was the snow was crunching under its feet, nor was it a human, for the steps were those of a four-footed object. The moon, that earlier in the evening had flooded the valley until it was almost as light as day, was now just dipping behind the mountain to the west, throwing the stable into deep shadow, from which the sounds now seemed to come. There was a bare possibility of its being some range cow, although they had all long since drifted down into the lower country, but she finally decided it must be one of the big bull elks which regularly wintered on the wind-swept sides of the mountain above them and sometimes came down to the ranch seeking feed during times of heavy snow. Shivering with the cold she crept back to bed realizing that daylight would soon come. Rudely her dreams were broken by a sound that at first froze the very marrow in her bones, but which with immense relief she instantly realized could come from the throat of but one animal and that, a mule.