father followed after, stopping only to light a candle.

Poor Joey was out of bed with his mother's arms round him when his father
got there; and on the bed lay Teddy's box of sweets scattered over the
cover-lid, with the Christmas stocking dragged up also, but its contents
not yet explored. The sweeties came first, and Joey had opened them and
now he screamed and pointed and screamed again, but for the moment
couldn't speak. He pointed into one corner of his little cubby-hole, and
then the tears came flooding his cheeks and he stopped screaming and clung
to his mother and wept as if his heart would break.

Ford, policeman-like, saw it all instanter, and a curtain seemed to lift
off his soul, and there glared the eyes of 'Santa Claus' into his mind's
eyes. In a second he put two and two together and understood why, deep in
his brain that night, had hidden such a feeling of stark care.

"Have you touched they sweets?" he asked, shaking the little boy to make
him attend. "Speak for your life, Joey! Have you ate one?"

Still the child couldn't collect himself. He screamed again when his
father shook him, and it was clear some fearful thing had overtook him;
but his grief didn't rise from no pain of body, and in truth the answer to
Joseph's question lay before his eyes, if he'd but understood the truth.
No scream would Joey have screamed, nor tear shed, if he'd helped himself
from the box; but 'twas a case when a big heart saved a little body, for
Joey had put another creature before himself and the first sweetie out of
the gift had went to his pup. 'Twas chocolates 'Santa Claus' had left, and
when the dog's jaws closed upon his little master's gift, he gave one jump
and leapt off the bed and was stone dead in three seconds before the child
got to him.

All that the parents presently learned from the shaking babe, and the
moment Joseph grasped the truth, he left his wife to praise God and got on
his clothes and ran without ceasing to Teddy Pegram's house. And in no
Christmas temper did he run neither, for he'd have well liked, in his
fury, to rob the hangman of a job. The size of the intended crime swept
over him in all its horror as he measured the past and remembered all that
the poacher had said and done; and his feet very near gave under him to
think of what a fellow creature can harbour hid from every other human
eye.

But he wasn't overmuch surprised to find Teddy Pegram didn't answer the
door, nor yet to disco