so many of the faces there was a
look of fine candour, an expression of cheerful expectancy and
confident goodwill.

There was on board a solitary Marine, with the stripes of Border
service on his coat. He had been sick in the Navy Hospital in
Brooklyn when his regiment sailed, and was now going over to join
it. He was a young fellow, rather pale from his recent illness,
but he was exactly Claude's idea of what a soldier ought to look
like. His eye followed the Marine about all day.

The young man's name was Albert Usher, and he came from a little
town up in the Wind River mountains, in Wyoming, where he had
worked in a logging camp. He told Claude these facts when they
found themselves standing side by side that evening, watching the
broad purple sun go down into a violet coloured sea.

It was the hour when the farmers at home drive their teams in
after the day's work. Claude was thinking how his mother would be
standing at the west window every evening now, watching the sun
go down and following him in her mind. When the young Marine came
up and joined him, he confessed to a pang of homesickness.

"That's a kind of sickness I don't have to wrastle with," said
Albert Usher. "I was left an orphan on a lonesome ranch, when I
was nine, and I've looked out for myself ever since."

Claude glanced sidewise at the boy's handsome head, that came up
from his neck with clean, strong lines, and thought he had done a
pretty good job for himself. He could not have said exactly what
it was he liked about young Usher's face, but it seemed to him a
face that had gone through things,--that had been trained down
like his body, and had developed a definite character. What
Claude thought due to a manly, adventurous life, was really due
to well-shaped bones; Usher's face was more "modelled" than most
of the healthy countenances about him.

When questioned, the Marine went on to say that though he had no
home of his own, he had always happened to fall on his feet,
among kind people. He could go back to any house in Pinedale or
Du Bois and be welcomed like a son.

"I suppose there are kind women everywhere," he said, "but in
that respect Wyoming's got the rest of the world beat. I never
felt the lack of a home. Now the U. S. Marines are my family.
Wherever they are, I'm at home."

"Were you at Vera Cruz?" Claude asked.

"I guess! We thought that was quite a little party at the time,
but I suppose it will seem small potatoes when