Part 25

"But I raised the Cape station, and they reported she passed there on schedule time."

"On time? Good! Thank you, Wesson; that's all."

"Were you expecting somebody on the Clermont?" asked Carlin, when the wireless man had gone.

"Not really expecting. My home is a thousand miles from here, and my pay won't allow of my family travelling around everywhere to meet me. But I like to dream of rosy possibilities, don't you?"

A cool night breeze was blowing. Wickett bared his head to it. Presently he began to hum:

"And it's O you little baby boy A-dancing on my knee-- Will it be a belted charger Or a heaving deck to sea? Is't to be the serried pennants Or the rolling blue Na-vee? Or is't to be----"

He turned to Carlin. "When I hear myself singing that, in my own quarters ashore, then I'm home--and not before."

He set to humming softly again:

"And it's O you little baby girl Athwart your mother's lap----"

Suddenly he asked: "Were you ever away from home sixteen months?"

Carlin emphatically shook his head. "No, sir. A year once. And I don't want to be that long away again. Were you--before this cruise?"

"Five years one time."

"F-i-i-ve! Whee-eee! Pretty tough that."

"Tough? More--inhuman. A man can get fat on war, but five years from your family--!" He raised his face to the stars and whoofed his despair of it.

"My year away from home," said Carlin, though not immediately, "was in the Philippines--where I first met you--remember? The night you landed from the little tug you were in command of and a bunch of us--war correspondents we called ourselves--were gathered around a big fire."

Wickett nodded. "I remember. And pretty blue was I?"

"Not at first. I thought you were the most care-free kid I'd met in months as you sat there telling about the funny things that had happened you and your little war tugboat. But towards morning, with only the two of us awake, I remember you as possibly the most melancholy young naval officer I'd ever met. You started to tell what a tough life the navy was for the home-loving officer or man, and I had a special reason for being interested in that. I had--I still have--a nephew with his eye on Annapolis. But just then reveille blew the camp awake and you went back to your tugboat."

Wickett smiled, though not too buoyantly, as he said: "Well, on my next cruise to the East I could have added a chapter to the story I might have told you by that overnight camp-fire. And I will now--but wait."

A ship's messenger was saluting the officer of the deck. "Taps, sir."

"Tell the bugler to sound taps," was the brisk command.

The ship's bugler had already taken position, heels together and facing seaward, in the superstructure bulkhead doorway. Looking straight down, Wickett and Carlin could see him, as, shoulders lifting and blouse expanding, he put his lungs into the call. From other ships, as he called, it was coming also--the long-noted, melancholy good night of the war legions.

When the last lingering note drooped out, only one ship, and she a far-away one, remained; but from her, finally, on the wings of the night breeze, the last notes drifted--gently, sweetly, lonesomely, to them.

* * * * *

"What was keeping me walking the deck or sitting up around camp-fires nights in the Philippines wasn't Filipinos," began Wickett. "I'd been in the East a year that time we met, and I put in another year on top of that in China. A terrible two years. But even two years in the East with your heart at home must have an ending. After all, the earth can only revolve so many days in one year, though at times I used to believe she'd quit revolving altogether, had stopped dead, was only marking time--'specially nights--and that the astronomical sharps weren't on to her changes. However, at last she'd rolled her sun up and her sun down the necessary seven hundred and odd times and I was headed for home.

"I went out a middy and came back an ensign--which is very important. An ensign may not rate many high rights in the service, but he does rate a leave of absence. And when my leave came I flew across the bay to the fort, where Colonel Blenner--Doris's father--was commandant. And on the way over I had a thousand visions, dreams, hopes, with of course a million misgivings, fears, doubts, and so on.

"When I met her I set it down right away that my misgivings had come true. A fleet of young artillery officers were manoeuvring within shelling range of her, and while I didn't expect her to bound half-way across the drill-ground and throw her arms around my neck, or anything like that, because she never had bounded down and thrown her arms around my neck, and wasn't the bounding-down-and-throwing-her-arms-around-your-neck sort of a girl anyway; but what I did sort of hope for was that after a polite little interval she'd turn the red-caped chaps adrift and say, 'Come on, Dick, let's sit down here in the corner by ourselves and have a good talk,' and perhaps later, before the evening got too old, go for a stroll on the long walk, same as she used to.

"But she didn't turn any of them loose. She kept them all about her while she drew me into the middle of them. But poor me! I'd had no service at all in the civilized ports and hadn't seen more than a dozen white women in the whole two years I'd been gone, and of that dozen had spoken to only three, while as for these artillery chaps--! They made me feel like a six-pound shell in a big turret magazine. Any one of them could talk the eye out of my head the best day I'd ever seen. And the day I came back to her wasn't the best day I'd ever seen--not for talking purposes. I looked at and listened to them, and kept saying to myself: 'I wonder if they realize what a lucky lot they are to be able to stay all the time around where civilized women live?' But I don't believe they did. They took everything as if 'twas no more than small-arms ammunition was being served out to them.

"In my room in the hotel that night I began to chart a few new courses for myself. Before I left for the East Doris was terribly young and there'd been no other war heroes hanging around. She and her mother were then living in a quiet hotel near my house while her father was off on some board mission in the West. But now it wasn't any isolated little country hotel. It was post quarters, with her father the commandant, and a parade of young army officers in and out of those quarters, with squadrons of two and three-stripers steaming over pretty regularly from the navy-yard across the bay. And she was two years older--a terrible advance, eighteen to twenty, and I'd been two years gone.