the dishes and gathered around the blazing fire. Ranger Winess produced
his omnipresent guitar and swept the strings idly for a moment. Then he
began to sing, "Silent Night, Holy Night." That was the beginning of an
hour of the kind of music one remembers from childhood. Just as each one
had chosen his favorite dish, now each one selected his favorite
Christmas song. When I asked for "Little Town of Bethlehem" nobody
hesitated over the words. We all knew it better than we do "Star
Spangled Banner!" I could have prophesied what Colonel White would call
for, so it was no surprise when he swung into "God rest ye merry,
gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay." Fortunately, most of us had sung
carols in our distant youth, and we sang right with the Colonel.

Someone suggested that each one tell of the strangest Christmas Day he
or she had ever spent. For a while none of us were in Arizona. Ranger
Winess was in a state of siege in the Philippines, while the Moros
worked themselves into a state of frenzy for the attack that followed;
Ranger Fisk scaled Table Mountain, lying back of Capetown, and there
picked a tiny white flower which he had pressed in the Bible presented
to him there that day; each sailor in port had received a Bible that day
with this inscription: "Capetown, Africa, Christ's Birthday, December
25, 19--." White Mountain snowshoed twenty miles in Yellowstone to have
Christmas dinner with another ranger, but when he got there he found his
friend delirious with flu. "Did he die?" we questioned anxiously. Ranger
Winess and the Chief looked at each other and grinned.

"Do I look like a dead one?" Ranger Winess demanded.

"I couldn't let him die," White Mountain said. "We had just lost one
Government man, mysteriously, and hadn't any more to spare. So I got his
dogs and sledge and hauled him into Headquarters."