On the way up the plank, he remembered, they passed one of
the fellows with his face in his hands, and Tom had to put his arm
around the boy and lead him, so that he might be in quarters in time.
Neither of them could know that this was to be the one who did not
return.

He had his first sight of the hold, after that, and the truth knocked
out some of the poetry. Ashley, and K Company in general, were quartered
just over the screw; but a man gets used to anything, even to bullets
that sing past your ears and clip off little bamboo leaves about two
feet from your hair. There were twelve hundred men below decks; when
most of the landsmen should be seasick--ugh!

The second night, Tuesday, he had sat with Cap among the coiled ropes on
deck. Beyond the shipping, the city of hills twinkled at them, striped
with long, sloping lines of dotted light; out of the blackness above,
the crown of the Spreckels building made a circlet like a halo over St.
Francis and his city; across the bay slid the mysterious, luminous
honeycombs of the silent ferry-boats. Far aft, the band was trying to
cheer things up with a Sousa march. That very tune was being played,
probably, down there where the Quadrangle, softly glowing with the faint
edging of lanterns, shimmered in the fairy-land mystery of long
palm-studded vistas, a-flutter with white dresses.

"They are saying good-bye to each other, now," said Tom, by way of a
feeler.

"Humph!" said Cap. He was flat on his back, looking up at the stars. "It
doesn't mean anything. When you're going to pull out across the Pacific
for God knows what, then it's different."

"I didn't expect to spend this evening lying on a ship's deck," murmured
Tom. He was thinking of what the Promenade Concert usually means to
people who have been taught something by co-education. That good-bye,
said in the Quadrangle when the music and the thoughtless people have
gone and the lanterns blaze up and drop, one after another, and lie
smoldering on the moonlit asphalt; those last words with people from
whom you have concealed yourself these four years and to whom you can
now afford to lay open your heart, as can the happy dead, because your
ways after to-night may lie apart,--Tom knew that this good-bye does
mean something, in spite of the superior announcement of Sophomore
Smith. Only it meant more to a fellow lying thinking about it among the
ropes of a transport's deck, with the Spaniards in prospect.

Cap's ciga