"Ah, Westerners!" exclaimed the old lady. "I come from the West
myself. My family goes back there every year."

"Yes," chimed in the girls, "we just love San Diego!"

"In what section of the town did you live?" asked the gentleman, and
my friend whom I was inwardly cursing, seeing my perplexity, quickly
put in for me:

"Oh, you would never know it, sir," and then lowering his voice in a
confidential way, he added, "he kept a barroom in the Mexican part of
the town."

"A barroom!" exclaimed the old lady. "Fancy that!" She looked at me
with great, innocent interest.

"Yes," continued this lost soul, "my father, who is a State senator,
sent him to boarding school and tried to do everything for him, but he
drifted back into the old life just as soon as he could. It gets a hold
on them, you know."

"Yes, I know," said the old lady, sadly, "my cook had a son that went
the same way."

"He isn't really vicious, though," added my false friend with feigned
loyalty--"merely reckless."

"Well, my poor boy," put in the old gentleman with cheery
consideration, "I am sure you must find that navy life does you a
world of good--regular hours, temperate living and all that."

"Right you are, sport," says I bitterly, assuming my enforced role, "I
haven't slit a Greaser's throat since I enlisted."

"We must all make sacrifices these days," sighed the old lady.

"And perhaps you will be able to exercise your--er--er rather robust
inclinations on the Germans when you meet them on the high seas,"
remarked the old man, who evidently thought to comfort me.

"If I can only keep him out of the brig," said this low-down friend of
mine, "I think they might make a first-rate mess hand out of him," at
which remark both of the girls, who up to this moment had been
studying me silently, exploded into loud peals of mirth and then I
knew where I had met them before--at Kitty Van Tassel's coming out
party, and I distinctly recalled having spilled some punch on the
prettier one's white satin slipper.

"We get out here," I said, hoarsely, choking with rage.

"But!" exclaimed the old lady, "it's the loneliest part of the road."

"However that may be," I replied with fine firmness, "I must
nevertheless alight here. I have a great many things to do before I
return to camp and lonely roads are well suited to my purposes. My
homicidal leanings are completely over-powering me."

"Watch him closely," said the old lady to my companion, as the ca