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Updated: May 7, 2025
His first anxiety about his wife was somewhat eased when he learned that Lidey had left her asleep; for he remembered that a heavy sleep always marked the end of one of her attacks. He only hoped that the sleep would hold her until they got home, for his heart sank at the thought of her terror if she should wake and find Lidey gone.
Another slight turn of the trail, and it ran once more directly towards the moon, stretching on and on till it narrowed from sight. And nowhere in the shining track was Dave to be seen. Lidey had now, however, but one thought in her quivering brain, and that was to keep running and get to her father before those dreadful voices could overtake her. She knew they were coming up swiftly.
Before Dave could reach it with his axe it was up and away in a panic after its two remaining fellows. Breathing heavily from his effort and from the storm of emotion still surging in his breast, Dave turned to the hut door and called "Lidey! Lidey! Are you there?" "Popsie! Oh, popsie, dear! I thought you weren't goin' to come!" cried a quivering little voice.
When the crunching of her own little footsteps stopped, however, she was instantly aware of the padding of other feet behind her. Looking back, she saw a pack of grey beasts just coming around the turn. They were something like dogs. But Lidey knew they were not dogs. She had seen pictures of them awful pictures. She had read stories of them which had frozen her blood as she read.
Across Dave's mind flamed a vision of the agony of horror that Lidey had been suffering since first those howlings fell upon his ears. His heart-break transformed itself into a mad rage of vengeance. As he turned, with a hoarse shout, upon the rest of the pack, he felt a hot breath on his neck, and bare fangs snapped savagely within an inch of his throat.
They were then about halfway up the slope, when from the cabin came a frightened cry of "Lidey! Lidey!" The door was flung open, the lamplight streamed out in futile contest with the moonlight, and Mrs. Patton appeared. Her face was white with fear.
As she saw Dave and the little one hurrying towards her, both hands went to her heart in the extremity of her relief, and she sank back into a chair before the door. Dave kicked off his snow-shoes with a dexterous twist, stepped inside, slammed the door, and with a laugh and a kiss deposited Lidey in her mother's lap. "She jest run down to meet me!" explained Dave, truthfully but deceptively.
Flinging open the door for the hundredth time, she gazed out eagerly across the moonlit snow and down the trail. The cloudless moon, floating directly above it, transfigured that narrow and lonely road into a path to wonderland. In the mystic radiance blue-white, but shot with faint, half-imagined flashes of emerald and violet Lidey could see no loneliness whatever.
Perhaps half a dozen times a day she would print a difficult communication to Santa Claus with some new idea, some new suggestion. These missives were mailed to the good Saint of Children by the swift medium of the roaring kitchen fire; and as the draught whisked their scorching fragments upwards, Lidey was satisfied that they went straight to their destination.
She was certain that, at the worst, he could not by any possibility be delayed beyond supper-time, for he was needed to get supper or, rather, as Lidey expressed it, to help her get supper for mother! Lidey was not hungry, to be sure, but she was getting mortally tired of unmitigated bread and butter and molasses. Supper-time, however, came and went, and no sign of Dave's return.
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