“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—?”

“I’m from the finest state in the Union.  The most glorious state in the—­”

“H’m—­Texas,” grinned Red Cap.

“How did you know!”

“Ah done heah ’em talk befoh, son.  Ah done heah ’em talk be-foh.”

It was a long journey through the great building to the section that had been set aside for Tyler and boys like him.  Tyler wondered how any one could ever find it alone.  When the Red Cap left him, after showing him the wash rooms, the tubs for scrubbing clothes, the steam dryers, the bath-tubs, the lunch room, Tyler looked after him regretfully.  Then he sped after him and touched him on the arm.

“Listen.  Could I—­would they—­do you mean I could clean up in there—­as much as I wanted?  And wash my things?  And take a bath in a bathtub, with all the hot water I want?”

“Yo’ sho’ kin.  On’y things look mighty grabby now.  Always is Sat’days.  Jes’ wait aroun’ an’ grab yo’ tu’n.”

Tyler waited.  And while he waited he watched to see how the other boys did things.  He saw how they scrubbed their uniforms with scrubbing brushes, and plenty of hot water and soap.  He saw how they hung them carefully, so that they might not wrinkle, in the dryers.  He saw them emerge, glowing, from the tub rooms.  And he waited, the fever of cleanliness burning in his eye.

His turn came.  He had waited more than an hour, reading, listening to the phonograph and the electric piano, and watching.

Now he saw his chance and seized it.  And then he went through a ceremony that was almost a ritual.  Stella Kamps, could she have seen it, would have felt repaid for all her years of soap-and-water insistence.

First he washed out the stationary tub with soap, and brush, and scalding water.  Then he scalded the brush.  Then the tub again.  Then, deliberately, and with the utter unconcern of the male biped he divested himself, piece by piece, of every stitch of covering wherewith his body was clothed.  And he scrubbed them all.  He took off his white leggings and his white cap and scrubbed those, first.  He had seen the other boys follow that order of procedure.  Then his flapping blue flannel trousers, and his blouse.  Then his underclothes, and his socks.  And finally he stood there, naked and unabashed, slim, and pink and silver as a mountain trout.  His face, as he bent over the steamy tub, was very red, and moist and earnest.  His yellow hair curled in little damp ringlets about his brow.  Then he hung his