In Tyler’s third week at the Naval Station mumps developed in his barracks and they were quarantined.  Tyler escaped the epidemic but he had to endure the boredom of weeks of quarantine.  At first they took it as a lark, like schoolboys.  Moran’s hammock was just next Tyler’s.  On his other side was a young Kentuckian named Dabney Courtney.  The barracks had dubbed him Monicker the very first day.  Monicker had a rather surprising tenor voice.  Moran a salty bass.  And Tyler his mandolin.  The trio did much to make life bearable, or unbearable, depending on one’s musical knowledge and views.  The boys all sang a great deal.  They bawled everything they knew, from “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” and “Over There” to “The End of a Perfect Day.”  The latter, ad nauseum.  They even revived “Just Break the News to Mother” and seemed to take a sort of awful joy in singing its dreary words and mournful measures.  They played everything from a saxophone to a harmonica.  They read.  They talked.  And they grew so sick of the sight of one another that they began to snap and snarl.

Sometimes they gathered round Moran and he told them tales they only half believed.  He had been in places whose very names were exotic and oriental, breathing of sandalwood, and myrrh, and spices and aloes.  They were places over which a boy dreams in books of travel.  Moran bared the vivid tattooing on hairy arms and chest—­tattooing representing anchors, and serpents, and girls’ heads, and hearts with arrows stuck through them.  Each mark had its story.  A broad-swathed gentleman indeed, Gunner Moran.  He had an easy way with him that made you feel provincial and ashamed.  It made you ashamed of not knowing the sort of thing you used to be ashamed of knowing.

Visiting day was the worst.  They grew savage, somehow, watching the mothers and sisters and cousins and sweethearts go streaming by to the various barracks.  One of the boys to whom Tyler had never even spoken suddenly took a picture out of his blouse pocket and showed it to Tyler.  It was a cheap little picture—­one of the kind they sell two for a quarter if one sitter; two for thirty-five if two.  This was a twosome.  The boy, and a girl.  A healthy, wide-awake wholesome looking small-town girl, who has gone through high school and cuts out her own shirtwaists.

“She’s vice-president of the Silver Star Pleasure Club back home,” the boy confided to Tyler.  “I’m president.  We meet every other Saturday.”

Tyler looked at the picture seriously and approvingly.  Suddenly he wished that he had, tucked away in his blouse, a picture of a clear-eyed, round-cheeked vice-president of a pleasure club.  He took out his mother’s picture and showed it.

“Oh, yeh,” said the boy, disinterestedly.

The dragging weeks came to an end.  The night of Tyler’s restlessness was the last night of quarantine.  To-morrow morning they would be free.  At the end of the week they were to be given shore leave.  Tyler had made up his mind to go to Chicago.  He had never been there.