midnight
The fire was warm and his eyes soon began `` to draw straws , '' but he did not wish to go to bed quite yet and , indeed , had a lingering hope that when his father returned he might coax him into letting him go out again and slide with Johnny and then , perhaps , stand a chance of seeing Santa Claus come up the long hill , with his reindeer flying like the wind over the snow and taking the roofs of the houses with a single bound . So he moved over to the sofa where he could see better , and where it would not be likely his sleepiness would be observed . The last thing he recalled in the sitting-room was when he parted the heavy curtains at the foot of the sofa and looked out at the snow stretching away down the hill toward the woods , and shining in the light of the great round moon which had just come up over the side of the yard to the eastward . Then he curled up in the corner of the sofa as wide awake as a boy could be who had made up his mind to keep awake until midnight . The next thing he remembered was Sate jumping up and snuggling by him , and the next was his father coming in and telling him Johnny was waiting outside with his sled and the two goats hitched to it to take a long ride , and his wrapping him up carefully in his heavy overcoat . In a second he was out in the yard and made a dash for the cow-lot , and there , sure enough , was Johnny waiting for him at the gate in the cow-pasture with a curious little peaked cap on his head and his coat collar turned up around his chin and tied with a great red comforter , so that only his eyes and nose peeped over it . As Tommy had never seen Johnny with that cap on before , he asked him where he had got it , and he said he had swapped caps with a little old man he had met driving a cow in the road as he came home .