ulling him. In the morning it had been pleasant
to wake up to its bare, clean whiteness, and to the tantalising
breakfast smells coming up from the kitchen below. His mother calling
from the foot of the narrow wooden stairway:

"Ty-_ler_!," rising inflection. "_Ty_-ler," falling inflection. "Get up,
son! Breakfast'll be ready."

It was always a terrific struggle between a last delicious stolen five
minutes between the covers, and the scent of the coffee and bacon.

"Ty-_ler_! You'll be late!"

A mighty stretch. A gathering of his will forces. A swing of his long
legs over the side of the bed so that they described an arc in the air.

"Been up years."

Breakfast had won.

Until he came to the Great Central Naval Training Station Tyler's
nearest approach to the nautical life had been when, at the age of six,
he had sailed chips in the wash tub in the back yard. Marvin, Texas, is
five hundred miles inland. And yet he had enlisted in the navy as
inevitably as though he had sprung from a long line of Vikings. In his
boyhood his choice of games had always been pirate. You saw him, a red
handkerchief binding his brow, one foot advanced, knee bent, scanning
the horizon for the treasure island from the vantage point of the
woodshed roof, while the crew, gone mad with thirst, snarled and
shrieked all about him, and the dirt yard below became a hungry, roaring
sea. His twelve-year-old vocabulary boasted such compound difficulties
as mizzentopsail-yard and main-topgallantmast. He knew the intricate
parts of a full-rigged ship from the mainsail to the deck, from the
jib-boom to the chart-house. All this from pictures and books. It was
the roving, restless spirit of his father in him, I suppose. Clint Kamps
had never been meant for marriage. When the baby Tyler was one year old
Clint had walked over to where his wife sat, the child in her lap, and
had tilted her head back, kissed her on the lips, and had gently pinched
the boy's roseleaf cheek with a quizzical forefinger and thumb. Then,
indolently, negligently, gracefully, he had strolled out of the house,
down the steps, into the hot and dusty street and so on and on and out
of their lives. Stella Kamps had never seen him again. Her letters back
home to her folks in Kansas were triumphs of bravery and bare-faced
lying. The kind of bravery, and the kind of lying that only a woman
could understand. She managed to make out, somehow, at first. And later,
very well indeed. As th