"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 types of negro.
"Reckon I am, uncle. Show me the way?"
Red Cap chuckled and led the way. "Knew you was f'om de south minute Ah see yo'. Cain't fool me. Le'ssee now. You-all f'om—?"