Quin | Page 8

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.
"There's a long, long night of waiting Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I'll be going Down that long, long trail with you."
What had "you" meant to him then? A girl--a pretty girl, of course; but
any girl. And now?

Ah, now he knew what he had been going toward, not only on those
terrible roads in France, but all through the years of his life. An
exquisite, imperious little officer's girl with divinely compassionate
eyes, who wasn't ashamed to dance with a private, and who had let him
hold her hand at parting while she said in accents an angel might have
envied, "Good-by, Soldier Boy."
Quin sighed profoundly and slipped his arm under his head, and at the
same moment the owner of the knee upon which he was leaning also
heaved a sigh and shifted her position, and somehow in the adjustment
two lonely hands came in contact and evidently decided that, after all,
substitutes were some comfort.
It was not until all the whistles in town had announced the birth of the
New Year that the party broke up, and it was not until then that Quin
realized that he was very tired, and that his pulse was behaving in a
way that was, alas, all too familiar.
CHAPTER 3
Friday after New Year's found Sergeant Graham again flat on his back
at the Base Hospital, facing sentence of three additional weeks in bed.
In vain had he risked a reprimand by hotly protesting the point with the
Captain; in vain had he declared to the nurse that he would rather live
on his feet than die on his back. Judgment was passed, and he lay with
an ice-bag on his head and a thermometer in his mouth and hot rage in
his heart.
What made matters worse was that Cass Martel had come over from
the Convalescent Barracks only that morning to announce that he had
received his discharge and was going home. To Quin it seemed that
everybody but himself was going home--that is, everybody but the
incurables. At that thought a dozen nameless fears that had been
tormenting him of late all seemed to get together and rush upon him.
What if the doctors were holding him on from month to month,
experimenting, promising, disappointing, only in the end to bunch him
with the permanently disabled and ship him off to some God-forsaken

spot to spend the rest of his life in a hospital?
He gripped his hands over his chest and gave himself up to savage
rebellion. If they would let him alone he might get well! In France it
had been his head. Whenever the wound began to heal and things
looked a bit cheerful, some saw-bones had come along and thumped
and probed and X-rayed, and then it had been ether and an operation
and the whole blooming thing over again. Then, when they couldn't
work on his head any longer, they'd started up this talk about his heart.
Of course his heart was jumpy! All the fellows who had been badly
gassed had jumpy hearts. But how was he ever going to get any better
lying there on his back? What he needed was exercise and decent food
and something cheerful to think about. He wanted desperately to get
away from his memories, to forget the horrors, the sickening sights and
smells, the turmoil and confusion of the past two years. In spite of his
most heroic efforts, he kept living over past events. This time last year
he had been up in the Toul sector, where half the men he knew had
gone west. It was up there old Corpy had got his head shot off....
He resolutely fixed his attention on a spider that was swinging directly
over his head and tried to forget old Corpy. He thought instead of
Captain Phipps, but the thought did not calm him. What sense was
there in his