Kansas school teacher in the days before she met and married Clint Kamps.  And she had never quite got over it.  So the book case contained certain things that a fond mother (with a teaching past) would think her small son ought to enjoy.  Things like “Tom Brown At Rugby” and “Hans Brinker, Or the Silver Skates.”  He had read them, dutifully, but they were as good as new.  No thumbed pages, no ragged edges, no creases and tatters where eager boy hands had turned a page over—­hastily.  No, the thumb-marked, dog’s-eared, grimy ones were, as always, “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” and “Marching Against the Iroquois.”

A hot enough little room in the Texas summers.  A cold enough little room in the Texas winters.  But his own.  And quiet.  He used to lie there at night, relaxed, just before sleep claimed him, and he could almost feel the soft Texas night enfold him like a great, velvety, invisible blanket, soothing him, lulling him.  In the morning it had been pleasant to wake up to its bare, clean whiteness, and to the tantalising breakfast smells coming up from the kitchen below.  His mother calling from the foot of the narrow wooden stairway: 

“Ty-ler!,” rising inflection. “Ty-ler,” falling inflection.  “Get up, son!  Breakfast’ll be ready.”

It was always a terrific struggle between a last delicious stolen five minutes between the covers, and the scent of the coffee and bacon.

“Ty-ler!  You’ll be late!”

A mighty stretch.  A gathering of his will forces.  A swing of his long legs over the side of the bed so that they described an arc in the air.

“Been up years.”

Breakfast had won.

Until he came to the Great Central Naval Training Station Tyler’s nearest approach to the nautical life had been when, at the age of six, he had sailed chips in the wash tub in the back yard.  Marvin, Texas, is five hundred miles inland.  And yet he had enlisted in the navy as inevitably as though he had sprung from a long line of Vikings.  In his boyhood his choice of games had always been pirate.  You saw him, a red handkerchief binding his brow, one foot advanced, knee bent, scanning the horizon for the treasure island from the vantage point of the woodshed roof, while the crew, gone mad with thirst, snarled and shrieked all about him, and the dirt yard below became a hungry, roaring sea.  His twelve-year-old vocabulary boasted such compound difficulties as mizzentopsail-yard and main-topgallantmast.  He knew the intricate parts of a full-rigged ship from the mainsail to the deck, from the jib-boom to the chart-house.  All this from pictures and books.  It was the roving, restless spirit of his father in him, I suppose.  Clint Kamps had never been meant for marriage.  When the baby Tyler was one year old Clint had walked over to where his wife sat, the child in her lap, and had tilted her head back, kissed her on the lips, and had gently pinched the boy’s roseleaf cheek