suthin' in my pack yer for Johnny. Take it off. I can't."

The Old Man unstrapped the pack and laid it before the exhausted man.

"Open it, quick!"

He did so with trembling fingers. It contained only a few poor
toys,--cheap and barbaric enough, goodness knows, but bright with paint
and tinsel. One of them was broken; another, I fear, was irretrievably
ruined by water; and on the third--ah me! there was a cruel spot.

"It don't look like much, that's a fact," said Dick, ruefully . . . .
"But it's the best we could do. . . . Take 'em, Old Man, and put 'em in
his stocking, and tell him--tell him, you know--hold me, Old Man--" The
Old Man caught at his sinking figure. "Tell him," said Dick, with a weak
little laugh,--"tell him Sandy Claus has come."

And even so, bedraggled, ragged, unshaven and unshorn, with one arm
hanging helplessly at his side, Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar and
fell fainting on the first threshold. The Christmas dawn came slowly
after, touching the remoter peaks with the rosy warmth of ineffable
love. And it looked so tenderly on Simpson's Bar that the whole mountain
as if caught in a generous action, blushed to the skies.

THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS.

She was a Klamath Indian. Her title was, I think, a compromise between
her claim as daughter of a chief, and gratitude to her earliest white
protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion, she had adopted. "Bob"
Walker had taken her from the breast of her dead mother at a time when
the sincere volunteer soldiery of the California frontier were impressed
with the belief that extermination was the manifest destiny of the
Indian race. He had with difficulty restrained the noble zeal of his
compatriots long enough to convince them that the exemption of one
Indian baby would not invalidate this theory. And he took her to his
home,--a pastoral clearing on the banks of the Salmon River,--where she
was cared for after a frontier fashion.

Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of
the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers
she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient. She
lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely
abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging like a chrysalis
to a convenient bough. She lied and she stole,--two unpardonable sins
in a frontier community, where truth was a necessity and provisions were
th