There was a sharp wind blowing. The snow was drifting. Outside, close to the road, a windmill stood on its tall, steel tower. From time to time the wind, giving this mill a twist, caused it to send forth a sharp, grating scream that seemed a human cry of pain.
“Boo!” Johnny whispered. “There’s something spooky about a lonely country place at night.”
A moment more and his thoughts were back with the Captain. “The wind,” he thought, “will be whistling about the corners of skyscrapers tonight. The snow will go scooting and whirling away and away just as it does among the crags of the Rockies. Cities are like that. Wonder where the Captain is now?”
Then again he seemed to hear the Captain’s rumbling voice as in this very room he told of his boyhood days.
“That is the very stove—” He spoke aloud now. Pretty Alice LeClare turned her shining black eyes upon him. “It’s the very stove that burned here many years ago when the Captain was a boy. He found it in the barn loft.
“And these chairs,” he went on, “are the very chairs on which he hung his stockings so long ago. He found them in the attic, bottoms gone, some broken. He had them restored. Seems—” His voice went husky. “Seems almost a sacred place.”
“It is sacred,” Alice whispered back. “The boyhood home of a good man, the things he loved, are always sacred.”
Johnny could have loved the little French Canadian for that speech.
“And what a privilege,” Alice murmured low, “just for one night to live as he lived, so simple, so plain, so true. To hang up our stockings, feeling that they will be filled, not by lavish hands, but by loving ones, with the simple things that only real love can find.”
“But listen!” Johnny touched her arm. “How that windmill screams! It seems a—a sort of warning. Perhaps our night will not be so serene after all. Per—”