Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1896 — OUR CHRISTMAS ROBBER. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

OUR CHRISTMAS ROBBER.

And How Two Boys Brouigtat Him to Grief.

E PLANNED it one day—my brother Sam and I—as we sat under a harvest apple tree. We agreed to scrape and save and buy father a silver watch and 'mother a new shawl |for Christmas. The jeweler threw off $4 on the price of the

watch* and on the day before Christmas old Santa Claus had the watch and shawl. Sam and I had sold apples, disposed of old plow-points, hoed corn for the neighbors, gathered and sold hickory nuts and worked various other schemes to get that sl2 shawl, and we had a right tb feel elated and proud. We had the articles hidden in the hay-mow at the barn, and about once an hour we had to go out there and take a look at them. It was just growing dark on Christmas eve when a stranger turned in at our gate and asked for lodgingß. He was a well-dressed, keen-looking man, and the fact of the village tavern being only two miles away, ought have set father to thinking, but when the man said he had

rheumatism, father invited him in and appeared to think it was ail right. Not so with Sam and I, however. We didn’t like the looks of the stranger, and when we discovered that he used profane langnage and chewed plug tobacco we ppt him down as a bad man. There was a bedroom off the parlor, and it was arranged that he should sleep in thetaAlso, that Santa Glaus should leave tha gifts for father and mother on the parlor table after he had gone to bed. The man excused himself about 9 o’clock and went to bed, and ten minutes later the watch and shawl were on the table. ‘‘Do you s'pose that feller heard about the watch and shawl?” queried Sam as we got into bed. “How could he?” “I dunno, but I believe he just came here to steal ’em.” We talked the matter over for a few minutes and then fdll asleep, and the old clock down in the kitchen was striking 12 when Sam midged me with his elbow and whispered: “That fellow is robbing the house!” “How do you know?” “Beeause-T can hear him moving about! There—don’t you hear that? We’ve got to go downstairs and stop him from taking that watch and shawl!” We slipped out of bed and drew on our

trousers and socks. When we got downstairs we found the parlor door wide open, the room lighted, and the stranger stood at the table with the watch in his hand. We had crept down so softly that he heard nothing. He was fully dressed, and as we watched him he pocketed the timepiece and removed the wrapper from the shawl. Sam’s idea had been to raise an alarm, but a sense of helplessness crept over him, and his teeth,, began to chatter before mine did. The man turned the lamplight almost out. He passed within a foot of us, unlocked the door and softly closed it behind him. Sam drew me across to the side window, pulled aside the curtain and said: “He’s got the watch and shawl and is now after the span of horses.” The stables were in the basement of the barn and half underground. The windows were very small and the door a stout one. Nhis door had no lock, but fastened with hasp and pin. We watched the man until lx\ opened the door and entered the stables, and then Sam said: “You stand right here and hold the door a little open for me.” “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to shut him in the stable. Don’t holler nor run away, for I’ll be back in a minute.” Out into the snow and cold dashed Bam, running like a deer and as noiseless as a cat. He found the door shut, and it did not take him ten seconds to lift up the hasp and slip the pin through the staple. When he came back we aroused father and mother, routed out the neighbors, sent for the Sheriff, and in about an hour the door was unfastened and the fellow invited to come out. He had strapped mother’s new shawl on one of the horses for a saddle and father’s Santa Claus watch was ticking away in his vest pocket. He was marched off to jail while the roosters w r ere crowing for Christmas. “Boys,” said my father, when we had returned to the house—“boys, I thank ye a thousand times over for this watch, which is something I’ve sorter wanted for years, but let me jest tell ye that ye both orter be taken out and licked fer not tellin’ me about that robber till ye had him safely locked up.” “And boys,” added mother, with tears in her eyes, as she hugged the shawl and us too, “I not only thank ye as much as father does, but I say ye did jest right in not wakin’ us up, I’d have had a fit and father might have tumbled down stairs, and there’s no tellin’ who’d a-busted up or who’d a tumbled into the cistern!” SAM’S BROTHER. Santa Claus will be just as well pleased If you distribute a few stockings instead of filling: auite so many this ye