fter ten weeks at the Great Central Naval Training Station so near
Chicago, Illinois, and so far from Marvin, Texas, there were two things
he missed.

He wanted the decent privacy of his small quiet bedroom back home.

He wanted to talk to a girl.

He knew he wanted the first, definitely. He didn't know he wanted the
second. The fact that he didn't know it was Stella Kamps' fault. She had
kept his boyhood girlless, year and year, by sheer force of her own love
for him, and need of him, and by the charm and magnetism that were hers.
She had been deprived of a more legitimate outlet for these emotions.
Concentrated on the boy, they had sufficed for him. The Marvin girls had
long ago given him up as hopeless. They fell back, baffled, their
keenest weapons dulled by the impenetrable armour of his impersonal
gaze.

The room? It hadn't been much of a room, as rooms go. Bare, clean,
asceptic, with a narrow, hard white bed and a maple dresser whose second
drawer always stuck and came out zig-zag when you pulled it; and a
swimmy mirror that made one side of your face look sort of lumpy, and
higher than the other side. In one corner a bookshelf. He had made it
himself at manual training. When he had finished it--the planing, the
staining, the polishing--Chippendale himself, after he had designed and
executed his first gracious, wide-seated, back-fitting chair, could have
felt no finer creative glow. As for the books it held, just to run your
eye over them was like watching Tyler Kamps grow up. Stella Kamps had
been a Kansas school teacher in the days before she met and married
Clint Kamps. And she had never quite got over it. So the book case
contained certain things that a fond mother (with a teaching past) would
think her small son ought to enjoy. Things like "Tom Brown At Rugby" and
"Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates." He had read them, dutifully, but
they were as good as new. No thumbed pages, no ragged edges, no creases
and tatters where eager boy hands had turned a page over--hastily. No,
the thumb-marked, dog's-eared, grimy ones were, as always, "Tom Sawyer"
and "Huckleberry Finn" and "Marching Against the Iroquois."

A hot enough little room in the Texas summers. A cold enough little
room in the Texas winters. But his own. And quiet. He used to lie there
at night, relaxed, just before sleep claimed him, and he could almost
feel the soft Texas night enfold him like a great, velvety, invisible
blanket, soothing him, l