oy
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