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some skirts,” said Bill Grey. The train jolted to a stop. Two untidy red-haired girls were standing beside the track waving their hands.
    “Give us a kiss,” cried Bill Grey.
    “Sure,” said a girl,—“anythin’ fer one of our boys.”
    She stood on tiptoe and Grey leaned far out of the window, just managing to reach the girl’s forehead.
    Fuselli felt a flush of desire all over him.
    “Hol’ onter my belt,” he said. “I’ll kiss her right.”
    He leaned far out, and, throwing his arms around the girl’s pink gingham shoulders, lifted her off the ground and kissed her furiously on the lips.
    “Lemme go, lemme go,” cried the girl.
    Men leaning out of the other windows of the car cheered and shouted.
    Fuselli kissed her again and then dropped her.
    “Ye’re too rough, damn ye,” said the girl angrily.
    A man from one of the windows yelled, “I’ll go an’ tell mommer”; and everybody laughed. The train moved on. Fuselli looked about him proudly. The image of Mabe giving him the five-pound box of candy rose a moment in his mind.
    “Ain’t no harm in havin’ a little fun. Don’t mean nothin’,” he said aloud.
    “You just wait till we hit France. We’ll hit it up some with the Madimerzels, won’t we, kid?” said Bill Grey, slapping Fuselli on the knee.
    “Beautiful Katy,
Ki-Ki-Katy,
You’re the only gugugu-girl that I adore;
And when the mo-moon shines
Over the cowshed,
I’ll be waiting at the ki-ki-ki-kitchen door.”
    Everybody sang as the thumping of wheels over rails grew faster. Fuselli looked about contentedly at the company sprawling over their packs and equipment in the smoky car.
    “It’s great to be a soldier,” he said to Bill Grey. “Ye kin do anything ye goddam please.”
     
    “This,” said the corporal, as the company filed into barracks identical to those they had left two days before, “is an embarkation camp, but I’d like to know where the hell we embark at.” He twisted his face into a smile, and then shouted with lugubrious intonation: “Fall in for mess.”
    It was pitch dark in that part of the camp. The electric lights had a sparse reddish glow. Fuselli kept straining his eyes, expecting to see a wharf and the masts of a ship at the end of every alley. The line filed into a dim mess hall, where a thin stew was splashed into the mess kits. Behind the counter of the kitchen the non-coms, the jovial first sergeant, and the business-like sergeant who looked like a preacher, and the wrinkled-faced corporal who had been on the Red Sox outfield, could be seen eating steak. A faint odor of steak frying went through the mess hall and made the thin chilly stew utterly tasteless in comparison.
    Fuselli looked enviously towards the kitchen and thought of the day when he would be a non-com too. “I got to get busy,” he said to himself earnestly. Overseas, under fire, he’d have a chance to show what he was worth; and he pictured himself heroically carrying a wounded captain back to a dressing tent, pursued by fierce-whiskered men with spiked helmets like firemen’s helmets.
     
    The strumming of a guitar came strangely down the dark street of the camp.
    “Some guy sure can play,” said Bill Grey who, with his hands in his pockets, slouched along beside Fuselli.
    They looked in the door of one of the barracks. A lot of soldiers were sitting in a ring round two tall negroes whose black faces and chests glistened like jet in the faint light. “Come on, Charley, give us another,” said someone.
    “Do Ah git it now, or mus’ Ah hesit-ate?”
    One negro began chanting while the other strummed carelessly on the guitar.
    “No, give us the ‘Titanic.’”
    The guitar strummed in a crooning rag-time for a moment. The negro’s voice broke into it suddenly, pitched high.
    “Dis is de song ob de Titanic,
Sailin’ on de sea.”
    The guitar strummed on. There had been a tension in the negro’s voice that had made everyone stop talking. The soldiers looked at him