Runnel paced
away from the embers and returned. Harry Baggs looked, with doubt and
wonderment, at the, ruined old man.
The mere word musician called up in him an inchoate longing, a desire
for something far and undefined. He thought of great audiences, roses,
the accompaniment of violins. Subconsciously he began to sing in a
whisper that yet reached beyond the huts. He forgot his surroundings,
the past without light, the future seemingly shorn of all prospect.
French Janin moved; he fumbled in precarious pockets and at last
produced a small bottle; he removed the cork and tapped out on his palm
a measure of white crystalline powder, which he gulped down. Then he
struggled to his feet and wavered away through the night toward a
shelter.
Harry Baggs imagined himself singing heroic measures; he finished,
there was a tense pause, and then a thunderous acclamation. His spirit
mounted up and up in a transport of emotional splendor; broken visions
thronged his mind of sacrifice, renouncement, death. The fire expired
and the night grew cold. His ecstasy sank; he became once more aware of
the human wreckage about him, the detritus of which he was now a part.
III
He spent the next day moving crated plants to delivery trucks, where
his broad shoulders were most serviceable, and in the evening returned
to the camp, streaked with fine rich loam. French Janin was waiting for
him and consumed part of Harry Baggs' unskilfully cooked supper.
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