He had his first sight of the hold, after that, and the truth knocked out some of the poetry. Ashley, and K Company in general, were quartered just over the screw; but a man gets used to anything, even to bullets that sing past your ears and clip off little bamboo leaves about two feet from your hair. There were twelve hundred men below decks; when most of the landsmen should be seasick—ugh!
The second night, Tuesday, he had sat with Cap among the coiled ropes on deck. Beyond the shipping, the city of hills twinkled at them, striped with long, sloping lines of dotted light; out of the blackness above, the crown of the Spreckels building made a circlet like a halo over St. Francis and his city; across the bay slid the mysterious, luminous honeycombs of the silent ferry-boats. Far aft, the band was trying to cheer things up with a Sousa march. That very tune was being played, probably, down there where the Quadrangle, softly glowing with the faint edging of lanterns, shimmered in the fairy-land mystery of long palm-studded vistas, a-flutter with white dresses.
"They are saying good-bye to each other, now," said Tom, by way of a feeler.
"Humph!" said Cap. He was flat on his back, looking up at the stars. "It doesn't mean anything. When you're going to pull out across the Pacific for God knows what, then it's different."
"I didn't expect to spend this evening lying on a ship's deck," murmured Tom. He was thinking of what the Promenade Concert usually means to people who have been taught something by co-education. That good-bye, said in the Quadrangle when the music and the thoughtless people have gone and the lanterns blaze up and drop, one after another, and lie smoldering on the moonlit asphalt; those last words with people from whom you have concealed yourself these four years and to whom you can now afford to lay open your heart, as can the happy dead, because your ways after to-night may lie apart,—Tom knew that this good-bye does mean something, in spite of the superior announcement of Sophomore Smith. Only it meant more to a fellow lying thinking about it among the ropes of a transport's deck, with the Spaniards in prospect.
Cap's cigarette shone like a glowworm in the shadow of the stack.
"Our good-bye supper will be sloppy weather, all right;" said he. "Six going out."
"No," answered Tom, "it won't be a drunk to-night, Cap. You haven't been in long enough. I'll bet they don't get through the first case; I'll bet it's a cry. You didn't see '95 go out."
"Well, perhaps," assented the Sophomore. "The fellows are pretty well worked up."
Tom went back to his Freshman days.