“Since I was a kid,” he admitted with a grin that sat queerly on the waxy saffron of his sea-sick face. “Yes, I even ‘tossed the pill’ at college—that is, until a shoulder I knocked out trying to slide home one day spoiled my wing.”
I knew I had him the instant that first admission left his lips. “Since the kids weren’t playing sand-lot baseball in Canada twenty years ago,” I said, ducking low to let the spray from a sea which had just broken inboard blow over, “you might just as well ’fess up and tell me which neck of the Mississippi Valley you hail from. Just as one Yankee to another,” I pressed, as his piercing eye turned on me a look that seemed to bore right through and run up and down my spine; “even as one Middle Westerner to another, for I was born in Wisconsin myself.”
For an instant his lips hardened into a straight line, and the flexed jaw-muscles stood out in white lumps on either side; then his mouth softened into a broadening grin, and a moment later he burst into a ringing laugh.
“Sure thing, old man, since you put it on ‘sectional’ grounds, and since we’re going to be shipmates for a week, and”—fetching me a thumping wallop on the back—“since we both wear the same uniform, anyhow, curly stripe and all, I’ll make a clean breast of it. I was born in Kansas—got a farm there, near a little burg called Stockton, to-day—and was never out of the Middle West in my
life till I crossed over into Canada to enlist in the first year of the war. I felt I had to get into the show somehow, and the little old U.S.A. was hanging fire so in the matter of coming in that I just couldn’t wait. I’ll tell you the whole story when we’re moored for the night.”
I have never been able to recall my yarn with D—— that evening without a hearty guffaw. A rising barometer had cleared the grey smother of mist from the sea, but a shift of the wind from south-east to north-east exposed us to a blast which, chilled at its fount in the frozen fjords of Norway, knocked the bottom out of the thermometer and filled the air with needle-like shafts of congealed moisture that seemed to have been chipped from the glassy steel dome of the now cloudless sky. There was a filigree of frost masking the wheel-house windows before the early winter night clapped down its lid, and the men who went forward to pass a line through the ring of the mooring-buoy pawed the icy deck with their stiff-soled sea-boots without making much more horizontal progress than a squirrel treading its wheel.
It would have been bracing enough if there had been a cheery open fire, or at least a glowing little sheet-iron stove, to thaw and dry out at, as there is on most patrol craft, and even on many trawlers. But in the particular type to which M.L. —— belonged (the units of which are said to have been
built in fulfilment of a rush order given one winter on the assumption that the War would be over before the next) there was no refinements and few comforts. Heating is not included among the latter: the only stove in the boat being in the galley, where the drying of wet togs in restricted quarters is responsible for a queer but strangely familiar taste to the pea-soup and Irish stew which you never quite account for until you discover the line of grease on the corner of the tail of your oilskin or the toe of your sea-boot.