When questioned, the Marine went on to say that though he had no home of his own, he had always happened to fall on his feet, among kind people.  He could go back to any house in Pinedale or Du Bois and be welcomed like a son.

“I suppose there are kind women everywhere,” he said, “but in that respect Wyoming’s got the rest of the world beat.  I never felt the lack of a home.  Now the U. S. Marines are my family.  Wherever they are, I’m at home.”

“Were you at Vera Cruz?” Claude asked.

“I guess!  We thought that was quite a little party at the time, but I suppose it will seem small potatoes when we get over there.  I’m figuring on seeing some first-rate scrapping.  How long have you been in the army?”

“Year ago last April.  I’ve had hard luck about getting over.  They kept me jumping about to train men.”

“Then yours is all to come.  Are you a college graduate?”

“No.  I went away to school, but I didn’t finish.”

Usher frowned at the gilded path on the water where the sun lay half submerged, like a big, watchful eye, closing.  “I always wanted to go to college, but I never managed it.  A man in Laramie offered to stake me to a course in the University there, but I was too restless.  I guess I was ashamed of my handwriting.”  He paused as if he had run against some old regret.  A moment later he said suddenly, “Can you parlez-vous?”

“No.  I know a few words, but I can’t put them together.”

“Same here.  I expect to pick up some.  I pinched quite a little Spanish down on the Border.”

By this time the sun had disappeared, and all over the west the yellow sky came down evenly, like a gold curtain, on the still sea that seemed to have solidified into a slab of dark blue stone,—­not a twinkle on its immobile surface.  Across its dusky smoothness were two long smears of pale green, like a robin’s egg.

“Do you like the water?” Usher asked, in the tone of a polite host.  “When I first shipped on a cruiser I was crazy about it.  I still am.  But, you know, I like them old bald mountains back in Wyoming, too.  There’s waterfalls you can see twenty miles off from the plains; they look like white sheets or something, hanging up there on the cliffs.  And down in the pine woods, in the cold streams, there’s trout as long as my fore-arm.”

That evening Claude was on deck, almost alone; there was a concert down in the ward room.  To the west heavy clouds had come up, moving so low that they flapped over the water like a black washing hanging on the line.

The music sounded well from below.  Four Swedish boys from the Scandinavian settlement at Lindsborg, Kansas, were singing “Long, Long Ago.”  Claude listened from a sheltered spot in the stern.  What were they, and what was he, doing here on the Atlantic?  Two years ago he had seemed a fellow for whom life was over; driven into the ground like a post, or like those Chinese criminals who are planted