knocked on the door. Laughter and loud talking came from inside the stateroom.
“Wait a sec!” came an unfamiliar voice.
“Sergeant Olster here?”
“Oh, it's one o' my gang,” came the sergeant's voice. “Let him in. He won't peach on us.”
The door opened and he saw Sergeant Olster and two other young men sitting with their feet dangling over the red varnished boards that enclosed the bunks. They were talking gaily, and had glasses in their hands.
“Paris is some town, I can tell you,” one was saying. “They say the girls come up an' put their arms round you right in the main street.”
“Here's the records, sergeant,” said Fuselli stiffly in his best military manner.
“Oh thanks.... There's nothing else I want,” said the sergeant, his voice more jovial than ever. “Don't fall overboard like the guy in Company C.”
Fuselli laughed as he closed the door, growing serious suddenly on noticing that one of the young men wore in his shirt the gold bar of a second lieutenant.
“Gee,” he said to himself. “I ought to have saluted.”
He waited a moment outside the closed door of the stateroom, listening to the talk and the laughter, wishing he were one of that merry group talking about women in Paris. He began thinking. Sure he'd get private first-class as soon as they got overseas. Then in a couple of months he might be corporal. If they saw much service, he'd move along all right, once he got to be a non-com.
“Oh, I mustn't get in wrong. Oh, I mustn't get in wrong,” he kept saying to himself as he went down the ladder into the hold. But he forgot everything in the seasickness that came on again as he breathed in the fetid air.
The deck now slanted down in front of him, now rose so that he was walking up an incline. Dirty water slushed about from one side of the passage to the other with every lurch of the ship. When he reached the door the whistling howl of the wind through the hinges and cracks made Fuselli hesitate a long time
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