Claude hadn’t intended to, but at this suggestion he pulled back the door.

“One moment,” called the aviator.  “Can’t you keep that long-legged ass who bunks under you quiet?”

“Fanning?  He’s a good kid.  What’s the matter with him?”

“His general ignorance and his insufferably familiar tone,” snapped the other as he turned over.

Claude found Fanning and the Virginian playing checkers, and told them that the mysterious air-man was a fellow countryman.  Both seemed disappointed.

“Pshaw!” exclaimed Lieutenant Bird.

“He can’t put on airs with me, after that,” Fanning declared.  “Crystal Lake!  Why it’s no town at all!”

All the same, Claude wanted to find out how a youth from Crystal Lake ever became a member of the Royal Flying Corps.  Already, from among the hundreds of strangers, half-a-dozen stood out as men he was determined to know better.  Taking them altogether the men were a fine sight as they lounged about the decks in the sunlight, the petty rivalries and jealousies of camp days forgotten.  Their youth seemed to flow together, like their brown uniforms.  Seen in the mass like this, Claude thought, they were rather noble looking fellows.  In so many of the faces there was a look of fine candour, an expression of cheerful expectancy and confident goodwill.

There was on board a solitary Marine, with the stripes of Border service on his coat.  He had been sick in the Navy Hospital in Brooklyn when his regiment sailed, and was now going over to join it.  He was a young fellow, rather pale from his recent illness, but he was exactly Claude’s idea of what a soldier ought to look like.  His eye followed the Marine about all day.

The young man’s name was Albert Usher, and he came from a little town up in the Wind River mountains, in Wyoming, where he had worked in a logging camp.  He told Claude these facts when they found themselves standing side by side that evening, watching the broad purple sun go down into a violet coloured sea.

It was the hour when the farmers at home drive their teams in after the day’s work.  Claude was thinking how his mother would be standing at the west window every evening now, watching the sun go down and following him in her mind.  When the young Marine came up and joined him, he confessed to a pang of homesickness.

“That’s a kind of sickness I don’t have to wrastle with,” said Albert Usher.  “I was left an orphan on a lonesome ranch, when I was nine, and I’ve looked out for myself ever since.”

Claude glanced sidewise at the boy’s handsome head, that came up from his neck with clean, strong lines, and thought he had done a pretty good job for himself.  He could not have said exactly what it was he liked about young Usher’s face, but it seemed to him a face that had gone through things,—­that had been trained down like his body, and had developed a definite character.  What Claude thought due to a manly, adventurous life, was really due to well-shaped bones; Usher’s face was more “modelled” than most of the healthy countenances about him.