ld over its freshly-mortared plate, he was
tramping on the wrenching cobble-stones of Market Street with a bunch of
roses in his campaign hat and another in his gun barrel, and the city
going mad on the curbing. Lord High Ruler of the Senior dance and
counsellor in all the affairs of the Class, he was cooped up with a
thousand others on the troopship _City of Peking_, a sergeant at
eighteen a month and lucky to get so much, with a chain of superiors
ordering his comings and goings.

All this because of the destruction of an American battleship in the
harbor of Havana.

The notes of a bugle-call drifted across the water from the nearest
transport, and Tom's mind went back to the time when the unfamiliar
sound was first heard on the Stanford campus. It seemed like a very old
memory, although it was but three weeks past. He remembered how, when
the recruiting sergeant came down from the city, the after-dinner crowd
used to sit on the Hall steps watching him drill the men in the
moonlight. After drill, they would loaf in his Hall room, talking it
over, and when the civilians had drifted off to bed or to the inglorious
studies of a routine now ended for Tom, he would sit with "Nosey" Marion
and blow smoke. Neither spoke much, only a word now and then, but they
were thinking of the same thing.

The days passed; the college used to drop out between recitations to
watch them drilling on the football field; the uniforms arrived, and
then the orders. There was a baseball rally that night, but when the
enlisted men came into the Hall and word was passed that they were going
on the morrow, the occasion was all theirs. Marion, who had been twice
on the debating team, stood up, looking slimmer than ever in his plain
blue, and spoke for them. He said only simple things; it was not like
his speech of a year before, when his impassioned arguments turned
defeat into victory at the Inter-Collegiate; but the crowd listened with
their eyes on the floor and applauded with their hands only when he had
done, because they couldn't trust their voices. They sang the terrible
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" after that; Langdon led it. "Peg" could
hardly carry a tune with that awful voice of his, but he sang the verses
so that the chills ran down your back and you had to join in the chorus,
"Our God is marching on."

Next day they themselves were marching on, forty of them, with hardly a
thought of what they were leaving behind, their minds fixed