Still, she saw that the story way was the true way in Will'm's case, for so many things that he was told to do, made him feel all "cross and scratchy and hot." They interfered with his play or clashed with the ideas he imbibed from Benjy. Some of Benjy's ideas were as "catching" and distorting as the mumps.

The conductor's punch did not long continue to be the daily reminder to Will'm that Libby's ring was to her, for it mysteriously disappeared one day, and was lost for months. It disappeared the very day that a row of little star-shaped holes was found along the edge of the expensive Holland window-shade in the front window of the parlor. Benjy had suggested punching them. He wanted a lot of little stars to paste all over their shoes. Why he wanted them nobody but he could understand.

But the punch served its purpose, for the Holland shade was not taken down on account of the holes, and whenever the row of little stars met Molly Branfield's eyes, they reminded her of the day when Libby threw herself into her arms, calling her "Mother" for the first time, and sobbing out the story of Ina and the swans. Distressed by Will'm's wickedness, Libby begged her not to stop loving him even if he did keep on being naughty, and to try the charm on him which would change him into a real little son. Many a time in the months which followed, the row of little holes brought a smile of tolerant tenderness, when she was puzzling over ways to deal with the stubbornness of the small boy who resented her authority. She knew that it was not because he was bad that he resented it, but because, as Libby suggested, he had "started out wrong in his hooking-up." Many a time Libby was moved to say mournfully, "Oh, if he'd just remembered what Miss Santa Claus told him, this never would have happened!"

It was not every day, however, that this crookedness was apparent. Often from daylight till dark he went happily from one thing to another, without a single incident to mar the peacefulness of the hours. He liked the new home with its banisters to slide down, and its many windows looking out on streets where something interesting was always happening. He liked to water the flowers in the dining-room windows. It made him feel that he was helping make a spot of summertime in the world, when all out of doors was white with snow. One of the pots of flowers was his, a rose-geranium. Even before the wee buds began to swell, it was a thing of joy, for he had only to rub his fingers over a leaf to make it send forth a smell so good that one longed to eat it.

He liked the race down the hall every evening trying to beat Libby to the door to open it for their father. Now that he was acquainted with him again, it seemed the very nicest thing in the world to have a big jolly father who could swing him up on his shoulder and play circus tricks with him just like an acrobat, and who knew fully as much as the president of the United States.

And Will'm liked the time which often came before that race down the hall—the wait in the firelight, while She played on the piano and he and Libby sang with her. There was one song about the farmer feeding his flocks, "with a quack, quack here, and a gobble, gobble there," that he liked especially. Whenever they came to the chorus of the flocks and the herds it was such fun to make all the barnyard noises. Sometimes with their lusty mooing and lowing the noise would be so great that they would fail to hear the latchkey turn in the door, and first thing they knew there their father would be in the room mooing with them, in a deep voice that thrilled them like a bass drum.

Libby entered school after the holidays, and Benjy started back on his second half-year, but he did not go regularly. Many a day when he should have been in his classes, he was playing War in the Branfield attic, or Circus in the nursery. It was always on those days that the crookedness of Will'm was more manifest, and for that reason, a great effort was made periodically to get rid of Benjy. But it seemed a hopeless task. He might be set bodily out of doors and told to go home, but even locks and bolts could not keep him out. He oozed in again somewhere, just like smoke. Repeated telephone messages to his mother had no effect. She seemed as indifferent to his being a nuisance to the neighbors as he was to his gartersnaps being unfastened. Several times, thinking to escape him when he had announced his intention the night before of coming early, Mrs. Branfield took Will'm down town with her, shopping. But he trailed them around the streets just like a little dog till he found them, and attached himself as joyously as if they had whistled to him. And he looked even worse than an unwashed, uncombed little terrier, for he was always unbuttoned and ungartered besides.

Upon these appearances, Will'm, who a moment before had been the most interested and interesting of companions, pointing at the shop windows and asking questions in a high, happy little voice, would pull loose from his companion's hand and fall back beside Benjy. The worst of it was that the unwelcome visitor rarely did anything that could be pointed out to Will'm as an offense. It was simply that his presence had a subtle, moving quality like yeast, which started fermentation in the Branfield household whenever he dropped into it.

Fortunately, when summer came, Benjy's mother departed to the seashore, taking him with her, and Will'm made the acquaintance of the children on the next block. There were several boys his own size who swarmed in the Branfield yard continually. He had a tent for one thing, which was an unusual attraction, and a slide. Up to a reasonable point he had access to a cooky jar and an apple barrel. Often, little tarts found their way to the tent on mornings when "the gang" proposed playing elsewhere, and often the long hot afternoons were livened with pitchers of lemonade in which ice clinked invitingly; a nice big chunk apiece, which lasted till the lemonade was gone, and could be used afterward in a sort of game. You dropped them on the ground to see who could pick his up and hold it the longest with his bare toes.

Will'm had a birthday about this time, with five candles on his cake and five boys, besides Libby, to share the feast. He loved all these things. He was proud of having treats to offer the boys which they could not find in any other yard on that street, and in time he began to love the hand which dealt them out. He might have done so sooner if Libby had not been so aggravating about it. She always took occasion to tell him afterward that such kindnesses were the little golden star-flowers mother was gathering for him, and that he ought to be ashamed to do even the littlest thing she told him not to, when she was so good to him.

Unfortunately Libby had overheard her mother speak of her as a real little comfort in the way she tried to uphold her authority and help her manage Will'm. The remark made her doubly zealous and her efforts, in consequence, doubly offensive to Will'm. He was learning early that a saint is one of the most exasperating people in the world to live with. Even when they don't say anything, they can make you feel the contrast sometimes so strongly that you want to be bad on purpose, just because they are the way they are.

Libby's little ring still turned her waking thoughts in the direction of Ina and the swans, and her morning remarks usually pointed the same way. The cherry-red stocking with its tinsel fringe hung from the side of her mirror, the most cherished ornament in the room, and a daily reminder of Miss Santa Claus, who was forever enshrined in her little heart as one of the dearest memories of her life. She felt that she owed everything to Miss Santa Claus. But for her she might have started out crooked, and might never have found her way to the mother-love which had grown to be such a precious thing to her that she could not bear for Will'm not to share it fully with her.

He learned to fight that summer, and nothing made him quite so furious as to have Libby interfere when he had some boy down, and by sheer force of will it seemed, since her three years' advantage in age gave her little in strength, pull him off his adversary, flapping and scratching like a little game-cock. Sometimes it made him so angry that he wanted to tear her in pieces. The worst of it was, that She always took Libby's part on such occasions, and never seemed to understand that it was necessary for him to do these things. She always looked so sorry and worried when he was dragged into the house, roaring and resentful.

Gradually as summer wore on into the autumn, it began to make him feel uncomfortable when he saw that sorry, worried look. It hurt him worse than when she sent him to his room or tied him to the table leg for punishment. And one night when he had openly defied her and been impudent, she did not say anything, but she did not kiss him good-night as usual. That hurt him worst of all. He lay awake a long time thinking about it. Part of the time he was crying softly, but he had his face snuggled close down in the pillow so that Libby couldn't hear him.

He wished with all his heart that she was his own, real mother. He felt that he needed one. He needed one who could understand and who had a right to punish him. It was because she hadn't that right that he resented her authority. All the boys said she hadn't. If she did no more than call from the window: "Don't do that, Will'm," they'd say in an undertone, "You don't have to pay any attention to her!" They seemed to think it was all right for their mothers to slap them and scold them and cuff them on the ears. He'd seen it done. He wouldn't care how much he was slapped and cuffed, if only somebody who was his truly own did it. Somebody who loved him. A queer little feeling had been creeping up in his heart for some time. Very often when She spoke to Libby she called her "little daughter" and she and Libby seemed to belong to each other in a way that shut Will'm out and gave him a lonesome left-in-the-cold feeling. Will'm was a reasonable child, and he was just, and up there in the dark where he could be honest with himself, he had to acknowledge that it was his own fault that she hadn't kissed him good-night. It was his fault because, having started out crooked, he didn't seem to be able to do anything but to go on crooked to the end. He couldn't tell her, but he wished, oh, how he wished, that She could know how he felt, and know that he was crying up there in the dark about it. He wished he could go back to the Junction and be Grandma Neal's little boy. She always kissed him good-night, even on days when she had to switch him with a peach-tree switch. When he was a little bigger he would just run off and go back to Grandma Neal.

But next morning he was glad that he was not living at the Junction, for he started to kindergarten, and a world of new interests opened up before him. Benjy came back to town that week, but he did not find quite the same tractable follower. Will'm had learned how to play with other boys, and how to make other boys do his bidding, so he did not always allow Benjy to dictate. Still the leaven of an uneasy presence began working again, and worked on till it was suddenly counteracted by the coming of another Christmas season.

Both Libby and Will'm began to feel its approach when it was still a month off. They felt it in the mysterious thrills that began to stir the household as sap, rising in a tree, thrills it with stirrings of spring. There were secrets and whisperings. There was counting of pennies and planning of ways to earn more, for they were wiser about Christmas this year. They knew that there are three kinds of presents. There is the kind that Santa Claus puts into your stocking, just because he is Santa Claus, and the Sky Road leads from his Kingdom of Giving straight to the kingdom of little hearts who love and believe in him.

Then there's the kind that you give to the people you love, just because you love them, and you put your name on those. And third, there's the kind that you give secretly, in the name of Santa Claus, just to help him out if he is extra busy and should happen to send you word that he needs your services.

Libby and Will'm received no such messages, being so small, but their father had one. He sent a load of coal and some rent money to a man who had lost a month's wages on account of sickness in his family, and it must have been a very happy and delightful feeling that Santa Claus gave their father for doing it, for his voice sounded that way afterward when he said, "After all, Molly, that's the best kind of giving. We ought to do more of it and less of the other."

When it came to the first kind of presents, neither Libby nor Will'm made a choice. They sent their names and addresses up the chimney so that the reindeer might be guided to the right roof-top, and left the rest to the generosity of the reindeer's wise master to surprise them as he saw fit. They were almost sure that the things they daily expressed a wish for would come by the way of the Christmas tree as the doll and the tricycle had the year before, "with the love of father and mother."

But when it came to the second kind of presents, they had much to consider. They wanted to give to the family and each other, and the cook and their teachers, and the children they played with most and half a dozen people at the Junction. The visit which they had planned all year was to be a certainty now. The day after Christmas the entire family was to go for a week's visit, to Grandma and Uncle Neal.

That last week the children went around the house in one continual thrill of anticipation. Such delicious odors of popcorn and boiling candy, of cake and mincemeat in the making floated up from the kitchen! Such rustling of tissue paper and scent of sachets as met one on the opening of bureau drawers! And such rapt moments of gift-making when Libby sewed with patient, learning fingers, and Will'm pasted paper chains and wove paper baskets, as he had been taught in kindergarten!

One day the conductor's punch suddenly reappeared, and he seized it with a whoop of joy. Now all his creations could be doubly beautiful since they could be star-bordered. As he punched and punched and the tiny stars fell in a shower, the story of Ina and the swans stirred in his memory, with all the glamour it had worn when he first heard it over his dish of strawberries. Down in his secret soul he determined to do what he wished he had done a year earlier, to begin to follow the example of Ina.

The family could not fail to notice the almost angelic behavior which began that day. They thought it was because of the watching eye he feared up the chimney, but no one referred to the change. He used to sit in front of the fire sometimes, just as he had done at the Junction, rocking and singing, his soft bobbed hair flapping over his ears every time the rockers tilted forward. But he was not singing with any thought that he might be overheard and written down as a good little boy. He was singing just because the story of the Camels and the Star was so very sweet, and the mere thought of angels and silver bells and the glittering Sky Road brought a tingling joy. But more than all he was singing because he had begun to weave the big beautiful mantle whose name is Love, and the curious little left-out-in-the-cold feeling was gone.

Christmas eve came at last. When the twilight was just beginning to fall, Libby brought down the stockings which were to be hung on each side of the sitting-room fireplace. It would be nearly an hour before their father could come home to drive the nails on which they were to hang, but they wanted everything ready for him. Will'm went out to the tool-chest on the screened porch to get the hammer. It took him a long time to find it.

Libby waited impatiently a few moments, supposing he had stopped to taste something in the kitchen. She was about to run out and warn him not to nip the edges from some tempting bit of pastry, as he had been known to do, but remembering how very hard he had been trying to be good all week, she decided he could be trusted.

With the stockings thrown over one arm she stood in front of the piano, idly striking the keys while she waited. She had learned to play several tunes during the year, and now that she was eight years old, she was going to have real lessons after the holidays and learn to read music. How much she had learned since the first time her little fingers were guided over the keys. She struck those earliest-learned notes again: "Three blind mice! See how they run!" She could play the whole thing now, faster than flying. She ran down the keys, over and over again.

When for about the twentieth time "they all took after the farmer's wife," she stopped short, both hands lifted from the keys to listen. Her face blanched until even her lips were pale. Such a sound of awful battle was coming from the back yard! Recognizing Will'm's voice she ran out through the kitchen to the yard.

"It's that everlastin' Benjy, again!" called the cook as Libby darted out the door to rescue Will'm from she knew not what.

But it was Benjy who needed rescuing this time. Will'm sat on top, so mighty in his wrath and fury that he loomed up fearsomely to the bigger boy beneath him, whose body he bestrode and whose face he was battering with hard and relentless little fists. Both boys were blubbering and crying, but Will'm was roaring between blows, "Take it back! Take it back!"

Whatever it was, Benjy took it back just as Libby appeared, and being allowed to stagger up, started for the street, loudly boo-hooing at every step, as he found his way homeward, for once of his own volition.[165]
[166]
[167] The cries had startled Libby but they were as nothing to the sight that met her eyes when she led Will'm, so blinded by his own tears that he needed her guidance, to the light of the kitchen door. What she saw sent her screaming into the house, with agonized calls for "mother." She still held on to Will'm's hand, pulling him along after her.

From forehead to chin, one side of his face was scratched as if a young tiger cat had set his claws in it. A knot was swelling rapidly on his upper lip, and one hand was covered with blood. Mrs. Branfield gave a gasp as she came running in answer to Libby's calls. "Why, you poor child!" she cried, gathering him up to her and sitting down in the big rocker with him in her lap. "What happened? What's the matter?"

He was sobbing so convulsively now, with long choking gasps, that he couldn't answer. She saw that his face was only scratched, but snatched up his hand to examine the extent of its injuries. As he looked at it too, the power of speech came back to him, in a degree.

"That isn't m-my b-blood!" he sobbed. "It's B-Benjy's blood!"

"Oh, Will'm!" mourned Libby. "On Christmas eve, just when you've been trying so hard to be good, too!"

She picked up the stockings which she had dropped on running out of the house, and laid his over the back of a chair, as if she realized the hopelessness of hanging it up now, after he had acted so. At that, almost a spasm of sobs shook him. He didn't need anybody to remind him of all he had forfeited and all he had failed in. That was what he was crying about. He didn't mind the smarting of his face or the throbbing of his swollen lip. He was crying to think that the struggle of the last week was all for naught. He was all crooked with Her again. She didn't want him to fight and she'd never understand that this time he just had to.

The arms that held him were pressing for an answer. "Tell me how it happened, dear."

Between gulps it came.

"Benjy said for me to come on—and go to the grocery with him! And I said—that my—my mother—didn't want me to!"

"Yes," encouragingly, as he choked and stopped. He had never called her that before.

"And Benjy said like he always does, that you w-wasn't my m-m-mother anyhow. And I said you was! If he didn't take it back I—I'd beat him up!"

Libby was crying too, now, from sympathy. He'd been told so many times he must not fight that she was afraid he would have to be punished for such a bad fight as this. To be punished on Christmas eve was just too awful! She stole an anxious glance towards the chimney, then toward her mother.

But her mother was hugging him tight and kissing him wherever she could find a place on his poor little face that wasn't scratched or swollen, and she was saying in a voice that made a lump come into Libby's throat, it was so loving and tender,

"My dear little boy, if that's why you fought him I'm glad you did it, for you've proved now that you are my little son, my very own!"

Then she laughed, although she had tears in her eyes herself, and said, "That poor little cheek shows just what fierce nettles and briars you've been through for me, but you brought it, didn't you! The most precious star-flower in all the world to me!"

The surprise of it stopped his tears. She understood! He could not yet stop the sobbing. That kept on, doing itself. But a feeling, warm and tender that he could not explain, seemed to cover him "from wing-tip to wing-tip!" A bloody little hand stole up around her neck and held her tight. She was his mother, because she understood! It was all right between them now. It would always be all right, no matter what Benjy and the rest of the world might say. He'd beat up anybody that dared to say they didn't belong to each other, and she wanted him to do it!

Presently she led him up-stairs to put some healing lotion on his face, and wash away the blood of Benjy.

Libby, in the deep calm that followed the excitement of so many conflicting emotions, sat down in the big rocking chair to wait for her father. Her fear for Will'm had been so strong, her relief at the happy outcome so great, that she felt all shaken up. A long, long time she sat there, thinking. There was only one more thing needed to make her happiness complete, and that was to have Miss Santa Claus know that the charm had worked out true at last. She felt that they owed her that much—to let her know. Presently she slipped out of the chair and knelt in front of the fire so close that it almost singed her.

"Are you listening up there?" she called softly. "'Cause if you are, please tell Miss Santa Claus that everything turned out just as she said it would. I'll be so much obliged."

Then she scudded back to her chair to listen for her father's latchkey in the door, and her mother's and Will'm's voices coming down the stairs, a happier sound than even the sound of the silver bells, that by and by would come jingling down the Sky Road.