III

All the first morning Tod Fanning showed Claude over the boat,—­not that Fanning had ever been on anything bigger than a Lake Michigan steamer, but he knew a good deal about machinery, and did not hesitate to ask the deck stewards to explain anything he didn’t know.  The stewards, indeed all the crew, struck the boys as an unusually good-natured and obliging set of men.

The fourth occupant of number 96, Claude’s cabin, had not turned up by noon, nor had any of his belongings, so the three who had settled their few effects there began to hope they would have the place to themselves.  It would be crowded enough, at that.  The third bunk was assigned to an officer from the Kansas regiment, Lieutenant Bird, a Virginian, who had been working in his uncle’s bank in Topeka when he enlisted.  He and Claude sat together at mess.  When they were at lunch, the Virginian said in his very gentle voice: 

“Lieutenant, I wish you’d explain Lieutenant Fanning to me.  He seems very immature.  He’s been telling me about a submarine destroyer he’s invented, but it looks to me like foolishness.”

Claude laughed.  “Don’t try to understand Fanning.  Just let him sink in, and you’ll come to like him.  I used to wonder how he ever got a commission.  You never can tell what crazy thing he’ll do.”

Fanning had, for instance, brought on board a pair of white flannel pants, his first and only tailor-made trousers, because he had a premonition that the boat would make a port and that he would be asked to a garden party!  He had a way of using big words in the wrong place, not because he tried to show off, but because all words sounded alike to him.  In the first days of their acquaintance in camp he told Claude that this was a failing he couldn’t help, and that it was called “anaesthesia.”  Sometimes this failing was confusing; when Fanning sententiously declared that he would like to be on hand when the Crown Prince settled his little account with Plato, Claude was perplexed until subsequent witticisms revealed that the boy meant Pluto.

At three o’clock there was a band concert on deck.  Claude fell into talk with the bandmaster, and was delighted to find that he came from Hillport, Kansas, a town where Claude had once been with his father to buy cattle, and that all his fourteen men came from Hillport.  They were the town band, had enlisted in a body, had gone into training together, and had never been separated.  One was a printer who helped to get out the Hillport Argus every week, another clerked in a grocery store, another was the son of a German watch repairer, one was still in High School, one worked in an automobile livery.  After supper Claude found them all together, very much interested in their first evening at sea, and arguing as to whether the sunset on the water was as fine as those they saw every night in Hillport.  They hung together in a quiet, determined way, and if you began to talk to one, you soon found that all the others were there.