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Book, page 211 / 259 Gettysburg he jumped to Flanders, and talked of aeroplanes, and gas- masks, and tanks, and trenches, and dugouts. Little by little then John McGuire began to talk--sometimes a whole sentence, sometimes only a word or two. But there was no fire, no enthusiasm, no impetuous rush of words that brought the very din of battle to their ears. And not once did Daniel Burton thrust his fingers into his pocket for his pencil and notebook. Yet, when it was all over, and John McGuire had gone home, Keith dropped into his chair with a happy sigh. "It wasn't much, dad, I know," he admitted, "but it was something. It was a beginning, and a beginning is something--with John McGuire." And it was something; for the next time Daniel Burton entered the room, John McGuire did not even start from his chair. He gave a faint smile of welcome, too, and he talked sooner, and talked more--though there was little of war talk; and for the second time Daniel Burton did not reach for his pencil. But the third time he did. A question, a comment, a chance word-- neither Keith nor his father could have told afterward what started it. They knew only that a sudden light as of a flame leaped into John McGuire's face--and he was back in the trenches of France and carrying them with him. At the second sentence Daniel Burton's fingers were in his pocket, and at the third his pencil was racing over the paper at breakneck speed. There was no pause then, no time for thought, no time for careful forming of words and letters. There was only the breakneck race between a bit of lead and an impassioned tongue; and when it was all over, there were only a well-nigh hopeless-looking mass of hieroglyphics in Daniel Burton's notebook--and the sweat of spent excitement on the brows of two youths and a man. "Gee! we got it that time!" breathed Keith, after John McGuire had gone home. "Yes; only I was wondering if I had really--got it," murmured Daniel Burton, eyeing a bit ruefully the confused mass of words and letters
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