we get over there.
I'm figuring on seeing some first-rate scrapping. How long have
you been in the army?"

"Year ago last April. I've had hard luck about getting over. They
kept me jumping about to train men."

"Then yours is all to come. Are you a college graduate?"

"No. I went away to school, but I didn't finish."

Usher frowned at the gilded path on the water where the sun lay
half submerged, like a big, watchful eye, closing. "I always
wanted to go to college, but I never managed it. A man in Laramie
offered to stake me to a course in the University there, but I
was too restless. I guess I was ashamed of my handwriting." He
paused as if he had run against some old regret. A moment later
he said suddenly, "Can you parlez-vous?"

"No. I know a few words, but I can't put them together."

"Same here. I expect to pick up some. I pinched quite a little
Spanish down on the Border."

By this time the sun had disappeared, and all over the west the
yellow sky came down evenly, like a gold curtain, on the still
sea that seemed to have solidified into a slab of dark blue
stone,--not a twinkle on its immobile surface. Across its dusky
smoothness were two long smears of pale green, like a robin's
egg.

"Do you like the water?" Usher asked, in the tone of a polite
host. "When I first shipped on a cruiser I was crazy about it. I
still am. But, you know, I like them old bald mountains back in
Wyoming, too. There's waterfalls you can see twenty miles off
from the plains; they look like white sheets or something,
hanging up there on the cliffs. And down in the pine woods, in
the cold streams, there's trout as long as my fore-arm."

That evening Claude was on deck, almost alone; there was a
concert down in the ward room. To the west heavy clouds had come
up, moving so low that they flapped over the water like a black
washing hanging on the line.

The music sounded well from below. Four Swedish boys from the
Scandinavian settlement at Lindsborg, Kansas, were singing "Long,
Long Ago." Claude listened from a sheltered spot in the stern.
What were they, and what was he, doing here on the Atlantic? Two
years ago he had seemed a fellow for whom life was over; driven
into the ground like a post, or like those Chinese criminals who
are planted upright in the earth, with only their heads left out
for birds to peck at and insects to sting. All his comrades had
been tucked away in prairie towns, with their little jobs and
their