A Reversible Santa Claus

Reversible Santa Claus, by
Meredith Nicholson

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Title: A Reversible Santa Claus
Author: Meredith Nicholson
Release Date: February 14, 2005 [EBook #15044]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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REVERSIBLE SANTA CLAUS ***

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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
By Meredeth Nicholson
A REVERSIBLE SANTA CLAUS. Illustrated. THE PROOF OF THE
PUDDING. Illustrated. THE POET. Illustrated. OTHERWISE
PHYLLIS. With frontispiece in color. THE PROVINCIAL
AMERICAN AND OTHER PAPERS. A HOOSIER CHRONICLE.
With illustrations. THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. With
illustrations.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK

A Reversible Santa Claus
[Illustration: "DO YOU MIND TELLING ME JUST WHY YOU
READ THAT NOTE?" (Page 78)]
Illustrations
"DO YOU MIND TELLING ME JUST WHY YOU READ THAT
NOTE?" Frontispiece
THE HOPPER GRINNED, PROUD OF HIS SUCCESS, WHICH

MARY AND HUMPY VIEWED WITH GRUDGING ADMIRATION
44
THE FAINT CLICK OF A LATCH MARKED THE PROWLER'S
PROXIMITY TO A HEDGE 116
THE THREE MEN GATHERED ROUND THEM, STARING
DULLY 150
From Drawings by F. Minard
* * * * *
[Illustration]

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