eed. "Tyler!" she called, through the din and
shouting. "Tyler, be good! Be good!" He only saw her lips moving, and
could not hear, so he nodded his head, and smiled, and waved, and was
gone.

So Tyler Kamps had travelled up to Chicago. Whenever they passed a
sizable town they had thrown open the windows and yelled, "Youp! Who-ee!
Yow!"

People had rushed to the streets and had stood there gazing after the
train. Tyler hadn't done much youping at first, but in the later stages
of the journey he joined in to keep his spirits up. He, who had never
been more than a two-hours' ride from home was flashing past villages,
towns, cities--hundreds of them.

The first few days had been unbelievably bad, what with typhoid
inoculations, smallpox vaccinations, and loneliness. The very first day,
when he had entered his barracks one of the other boys, older in
experience, misled by Tyler's pink and white and gold colouring, had
leaned forward from amongst a group and had called in glad surprise, at
the top of a leathery pair of lungs:

"Why, hello, sweetheart!" The others had taken it up with cruelty of
their age. "Hello, sweetheart!" It had stuck. Sweetheart. In the hard
years that followed--years in which the blood-thirsty and piratical
games of his boyhood paled to the mildest of imaginings--the nickname
still clung, long after he had ceased to resent it; long after he had
stripes and braid to refute it.

But in that Tyler Kamps we are not interested. It is the boy Tyler Kamps
with whom we have to do. Bewildered, lonely, and a little resentful.
Wondering where the sea part of it came in. Learning to say "on the
station" instead of "at the station," the idea being that the great
stretch of land on which the station was located was not really land,
but water; and the long wooden barracks not really barracks at all, but
ships. Learning to sleep in a hammock (it took him a full week).
Learning to pin back his sailor collar to save soiling the white braid
on it (that meant scrubbing). Learning--but why go into detail? One
sentence covers it.

Tyler met Gunner Moran. Moran, tattooed, hairy-armed, hairy-chested as a
gorilla and with something of the sadness and humour of the gorilla in
his long upper lip and short forehead. But his eyes did not bear out the
resemblance. An Irish blue; bright, unravaged; clear beacon lights in a
rough and storm-battered countenance. Gunner Moran wasn't a gunner at
all, or even a gunner's mate, but