at straight-from-the-shoulder,
elbow-flirting, right-off-the-ends-of-the-fingers action was so like
another motion with which I had long been familiar, that, with a meaning
side-squint, I observed promptly:

"So you add baseball to your other accomplishments, do you? Did a bit of
pitching, if I don't miss my guess? How long have you played?"

"Since I was a kid," he admitted with a grin that sat queerly on the
waxy saffron of his sea-sick face. "Yes, I even 'tossed the pill' at
college--that is, until a shoulder I knocked out trying to slide home
one day spoiled my wing."

I knew I had him the instant that first admission left his lips. "Since
the kids weren't playing sand-lot baseball in Canada twenty years ago,"
I said, ducking low to let the spray from a sea which had just broken
inboard blow over, "you might just as well 'fess up and tell me which
neck of the Mississippi Valley you hail from. Just as one Yankee to
another," I pressed, as his piercing eye turned on me a look that seemed
to bore right through and run up and down my spine; "even as one Middle
Westerner to another, for I was born in Wisconsin myself."

For an instant his lips hardened into a straight line, and the flexed
jaw-muscles stood out in white lumps on either side; then his mouth
softened into a broadening grin, and a moment later he burst into a
ringing laugh.

"Sure thing, old man, since you put it on 'sectional' grounds, and since
we're going to be shipmates for a week, and"--fetching me a thumping
wallop on the back--"since we both wear the same uniform, anyhow, curly
stripe and all, I'll make a clean breast of it. I was born in
Kansas--got a farm there, near a little burg called Stockton,
to-day--and was never out of the Middle West in my life till I crossed
over into Canada to enlist in the first year of the war. I felt I had to
get into the show somehow, and the little old U.S.A. was hanging fire so
in the matter of coming in that I just couldn't wait. I'll tell you the
whole story when we're moored for the night."

* * * * *

I have never been able to recall my yarn with D---- that evening without
a hearty guffaw. A rising barometer had cleared the grey smother of mist
from the sea, but a shift of the wind from south-east to north-east
exposed us to a blast which, chilled at its fount in the frozen fjords
of Norway, knocked the bottom out of the thermometer and filled the air
with needle-like shafts