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Tyler found himself in the same car with Moran. He edged over to a seat near him, watching him narrowly. Moran was not mingling with the other boys. He kept aloof, his sea-blue eyes gazing out at the flat Illinois prairie. All about him swept and eddied the currents and counter-currents of talk.

“They say there’s a swell supper in the Tower Building for fifty cents.”

“Fifty nothing. Get all you want in the Library canteen for nix.”

“Where’s this dance, huh?”

“Search me.”

“Heh, Murph! I’ll shoot you a game of pool at the club.”

“Naw, I gotta date.”

Tyler’s glance encountered Moran’s, and rested there. Scorn curled the Irishman’s broad upper lip. “Navy! This ain’t no navy no more. It’s a Sunday school, that’s what! Phonographs, an’ church suppers, an’ pool an’ dances! It’s enough t’ turn a fella’s stomick. Lot of Sunday school kids don’t know a sail from a tablecloth when they see it.”

He relapsed into contemptuous silence.

Tyler, who but a moment before had been envying them their familiarity with these very things now nodded and smiled understanding at Moran. “That’s right,” he said. Moran regarded him a moment, curiously. Then he resumed his staring out of the window. You would never have guessed that in that bullet head there was bewilderment and resentment almost equalling Tyler’s, but for a much different reason. Gunner Moran was of the old navy–the navy that had been despised and spat upon. In those days his uniform alone had barred him from decent theatres, decent halls, decent dances, contact with decent people. They had forced him to a knowledge of the burlesque houses, the cheap theatres, the shooting galleries, the saloons, the dives. And now, bewilderingly, the public had right-about faced. It opened its doors to him. It closed its saloons to him. It sought him out. It offered him amusement. It invited him to its home, and sat him down at its table, and introduced him to its daughter.

“Nix!” said Gunner Moran, and spat between his teeth. “Not f’r me. I pick me own lady friends.”

Gunner Moran was used to picking his own lady friends. He had picked them in wicked Port Said, and in Fiume; in Yokohama and Naples. He had picked them unerringly, and to his taste, in Cardiff, and Hamburg, and Vladivostok.

When the train drew in at the great Northwestern station shed he was down the steps and up the long platform before the wheels had ceased revolving.

Tyler came down the steps slowly. Blue uniforms were streaming past him–a flood of them. White leggings twinkled with the haste of their wearers. Caps, white or blue, flowed like a succession of rippling waves and broke against the great doorway, and were gone.

In Tyler’s town, back home in Marvin, Texas, you knew the train numbers and their schedules, and you spoke of them by name, familiarly and affectionately, as Number Eleven and Number Fifty-five. “I reckon Fifty-five’ll be late to-day, on account of the storm.”

Now he saw half a dozen trains lined up at once, and a dozen more tracks waiting, empty. The great train shed awed him. The vast columned waiting room, the hurrying people, the uniformed guards gave him a feeling of personal unimportance. He felt very negligible, and useless, and alone. He stood, a rather dazed blue figure, in the vastness of that shining place. A voice–the soft, cadenced voice of the negro–addressed him.

“Lookin’ fo’ de sailors’ club rooms?”

Tyler turned. A toothy, middle-aged, kindly negro in a uniform and red cap. Tyler smiled friendlily. Here was a human he could feel at ease with. Texas was full of just such faithful, friendly types of negro.

“Reckon I am, uncle. Show me the way?”

Red Cap chuckled and led the way. “Knew you was f’om de south minute Ah see yo’. Cain’t fool me. Le’ssee now. You-all f’om–?”

“I’m from the finest state in the Union. The most glorious state in the–“

“H’m–Texas,” grinned Red Cap.

“How did you know!”