Five thirty.  Reveille.

Tyler awoke with the feeling that something was going to happen.  Something pleasant.  Then he remembered, and smiled.  Dabney Courtney, in the next hammock, was leaning far over the side of his perilous perch and delivering himself of his morning speech.  Tyler did not quite understand this young southern elegant.  Monicker had two moods, both of which puzzled Tyler.  When he awoke feeling gay he would lean over the extreme edge of his hammock and drawl, with an affected English accent: 

“If this is Venice, where are the canals?”

In his less cheerful moments he would groan, heavily, “There ain’t no Gawd!”

This last had been his morning observation during their many weeks of durance vile.  But this morning he was, for the first time in many days, enquiring about Venetian waterways.

Tyler had no pal.  His years of companionship with his mother had bred in him a sort of shyness, a diffidence.  He heard the other boys making plans for shore leave.  They all scorned Waukegan, which was the first sizable town beyond the Station.  Chicago was their goal.  They were like a horde of play-hungry devils after their confinement.  Six weeks of restricted freedom, six weeks of stored-up energy made them restive as colts.

“Goin’ to Chicago, kid?” Moran asked him, carelessly.  It was Saturday morning.

“Yes.  Are you?” eagerly.

“Kin a duck swim?”

At the Y.M.C.A. they had given him tickets to various free amusements and entertainments.  They told him about free canteens, and about other places where you could get a good meal, cheap.  One of the tickets was for a dance.  Tyler knew nothing of dancing.  This dance was to be given at some kind of woman’s club on Michigan Boulevard.  Tyler read the card, glumly.  A dance meant girls.  He knew that.  Why hadn’t he learned to dance?

Tyler walked down to the station and waited for the train that would bring him to Chicago at about one o’clock.  The other boys, in little groups, or in pairs, were smoking and talking.  Tyler wanted to join them, but he did not.  They seemed so sufficient unto themselves, with their plans, and their glib knowledge of places, and amusements, and girls.  On the train they all bought sweets from the train butcher—­chocolate maraschinos, and nut bars, and molasses kisses—­and ate them as greedily as children, until their hunger for sweets was surfeited.

Tyler found himself in the same car with Moran.  He edged over to a seat near him, watching him narrowly.  Moran was not mingling with the other boys.  He kept aloof, his sea-blue eyes gazing out at the flat Illinois prairie.  All about him swept and eddied the currents and counter-currents of talk.

“They say there’s a swell supper in the Tower Building for fifty cents.”

“Fifty nothing.  Get all you want in the Library canteen for nix.”

“Where’s this dance, huh?”