One by one, the singers fell under the spell of the
music and the firelight. Cass and Fan Loomis sat shoulder to shoulder on
the broken-springed couch and gazed with blissful oblivion into the red
embers on the hearth. Rose, whose voice led all the rest, surreptitiously
wiped her eyes when no one was looking; Edwin and Myrna, solemnly
plucking their banjo and guitar, were lost in moods of dormant emotion;
while Papa Claude at the piano let his dim eyes range the pictured walls,
while his memory traveled back through the years on many a secret tryst
of its own.
But it was the lank Sergeant with the big feet, and the hair that stood
up where it shouldn't, who dared to dream the most preposterous dream of
them all. For, as he sang there in the firelight, a little god was busy
lighting the tapers in the most sacred shrines of his being, until he
felt like a cathedral at high mass with all the chimes going.
"There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams."
How many times he had sung it in France!--jolting along muddy, endless
roads, heartsick, homesick.
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