. 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 ty