Jamie shook his head. "I'm sorry, lad; I've lost it. I was making so many songs those days--ye couldn't be expecting a body to carry them all about in his head. Now could ye?" The lips tried bravely to smile, and failed again. But Larry grinned triumphantly. "Sure 'Granny' has it wrote down. He showed it to me once. Fetch it, 'Granny,' an' let Jamie be re--" He broke off, aghast; the lads about him were staring in absolute horror. Only the singing lad showed nothing. He might not have heard, or, hearing, the words were meaningless. So Sheila took matters into her own hands. She covered the eyes with fresh gauze, wrapped Jamie up, and bundled him out in his chair to Harrigan with the remark that the day was too fine to miss and there was more of it outside the hospital than in. She watched until she had seen Harrigan take him to a sunny, wind-sheltered corner of the gardens, and then she came back to 7-A. She was thinking of Peter Brooks, her man at the front, and she was trying to fathom with all her heart what manner of healing she would give had Peter come back to her as Jamie O'Hara had come. She closed the door of the ward behind her and faced the twelve. "Lads, what are we going to do for Jamie?" Larry groaned out loud. It was the first luxury of expression he had indulged in since Jamie had been wheeled out. "Aye, what are we goin' to do? That's what every man of us has been askin' himself since--since he knew." "We act like a crowd o' half-wits, a-thryin' to boost his spirits a bit, an' all the time he grows whiter an' quieter." Patsy turned his head away; his lips were twitching. "Aye, that's God's truth." "Bertha's" hoarse croak was heavy with despair. "Ye can see for yourself, miss, it's noways nat'ral for Jamie--that's the worst of it. It's been Jamie, just, that always put heart back in us when things went blackest. Wasn't it him that made it easy goin' for them that went west? Can one of us mind the time he wasn't ready with a song to fetch us over the top, or through the mud--or straight to death, if them was the orders? No matter how loud the guns screeched, we could always hear Jamie above them." "We could hear him when we couldn't have heard another sound," Culmullen mumbled. "Gospel" Smith raised a bandaged head and leveled piercing eyes at Sheila. "You know what the Gospel says about the stars singing in the morning--all together like? Well, Jamie was the lad who could outsing them. You know how it feels at that gray, creepy hour o' dawn, when a man's heart jumps to his throat and sticks there, and his hands shake like a girl's? Often's the time we'd be waiting orders to attack just like that. The stars might have shouted themselves clear o' the sky, for all the good they'd have done us; but Jamie was different. He'd make us a couplet or a verse to sing low under our breath, something you could put your teeth into. And when the orders came our hearts were always back where the Lord had put them."