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    A Reversible Santa Claus
    A Reversible Santa Claus
    A Reversible Santa Claus
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    A Reversible Santa Claus

    By Meredith Nicholson

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateOct 1, 2006
    A Reversible Santa Claus

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      Book preview

      A Reversible Santa Claus - Meredith Nicholson

      Project Gutenberg's A Reversible Santa Claus, by Meredith Nicholson

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: A Reversible Santa Claus

      Author: Meredith Nicholson

      Release Date: February 14, 2005 [EBook #15044]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A REVERSIBLE SANTA CLAUS ***

      Produced by Suzanne Shell, Emmy and the PG Online Distributed

      Proofreading Team.(www.pgdp.net)

      Contents

      By Meredith Nicholson

      HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

      Boston and New York

      A

      REVERSIBLE

      SANTA CLAUS

      BY

      MEREDITH NICHOLSON

      WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLORENCE H. MINARD

      BOSTON and NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

      The Riverside Press, Cambridge

      1917

      COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      Published October 1917

      A Reversible Santa Claus

      DO YOU MIND TELLING ME JUST WHY YOU READ THAT NOTE?. (page 78)

      Illustrations

      From Drawings by F. Minard

      A Reversible Santa Claus

      I

      Mr. William B. Aikins, alias Softy Hubbard, alias Billy The Hopper, paused for breath behind a hedge that bordered a quiet lane and peered out into the highway at a roadster whose tail light advertised its presence to his felonious gaze. It was Christmas Eve, and after a day of unseasonable warmth a slow, drizzling rain was whimsically changing to snow.

      The Hopper was blowing from two hours' hard travel over rough country. He had stumbled through woodlands, flattened himself in fence corners to avoid the eyes of curious motorists speeding homeward or flying about distributing Christmas gifts, and he was now bent upon committing himself to an inter-urban trolley line that would afford comfortable transportation for the remainder of his journey. Twenty miles, he estimated, still lay between him and his domicile.

      The rain had penetrated his clothing and vigorous exercise had not greatly diminished the chill in his blood. His heart knocked violently against his ribs and he was dismayed by his shortness of wind. The Hopper was not so young as in the days when his agility and genius for effecting a quick get-away had earned for him his sobriquet. The last time his Bertillon measurements were checked (he was subjected to this humiliating experience in Omaha during the Ak-Sar-Ben carnival three years earlier) official note was taken of the fact that The Hopper's hair, long carried in the records as black, was rapidly whitening.

      At forty-eight a crook—even so resourceful and versatile a member of the fraternity as The Hopper—begins to mistrust himself. For the greater part of his life, when not in durance vile, The Hopper had been in hiding, and the state or condition of being a fugitive, hunted by keen-eyed agents of justice, is not, from all accounts, an enviable one. His latest experience of involuntary servitude had been under the auspices of the State of Oregon, for a trifling indiscretion in the way of safe-blowing. Having served his sentence, he skillfully effaced himself by a year's siesta on a pine-apple plantation in Hawaii. The island climate was not wholly pleasing to The Hopper, and when pine-apples palled he took passage from Honolulu as a stoker, reached San Francisco (not greatly chastened in spirit), and by a series of characteristic hops, skips, and jumps across the continent landed in Maine by way of the Canadian provinces. The Hopper needed money. He was not without a certain crude philosophy, and it had been his dream to acquire by some brilliant coup a sufficient fortune upon which to retire and live as a decent, law-abiding citizen for the remainder of his days. This ambition, or at least the means to its fulfillment, can hardly be defended as praiseworthy, but The Hopper was a singular character and we must take him as we find him. Many prison chaplains and jail visitors bearing tracts had striven with little success to implant moral ideals in the mind and soul of The Hopper, but he was still to be catalogued among the impenitent; and as he moved southward through the Commonwealth of Maine he was so oppressed by his poverty, as contrasted with the world's abundance, that he lifted forty thousand dollars in a neat bundle from an express car which Providence had sidetracked, apparently for his personal enrichment, on the upper waters of the Penobscot. Whereupon he began perforce playing his old game of artful dodging, exercising his best powers as a hopper and skipper. Forty thousand dollars is no inconsiderable sum of money, and the success of this master stroke of his career was not to be jeopardized by careless moves. By craftily hiding in the big woods and making himself agreeable to isolated lumberjacks who rarely saw newspapers, he arrived in due course on Manhattan Island, where with shrewd judgment he avoided the haunts of his kind while planning a future commensurate with his new dignity as a capitalist.

      He spent a year as a diligent and faithful employee of a garage which served a fashionable quarter of the metropolis; then, animated by a worthy desire to continue to lead an honest life, he purchased a chicken farm fifteen miles as the crow flies from Center Church, New Haven, and boldly opened a bank account in that academic center in his newly adopted name of Charles S. Stevens, of Happy Hill Farm. Feeling the need of companionship, he married a lady somewhat his junior, a shoplifter of the second class, whom he had known before the vigilance of the metropolitan police necessitated his removal to the Far West. Mrs. Stevens's inferior talents as a petty larcenist had led her into many difficulties, and she gratefully availed herself of The Hopper's offer of his heart and hand.

      They had added to their establishment a retired yegg who had lost an eye by the premature popping of

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