And he could see them reading that in Washington!
There would be an endorsement to go ringing down the departmental
ancestral halls! And as for the other yeomen, his colleagues in the
service, for generations his name would resound among 'em. But he
decided that that would be too much glory for one yeoman, and besides,
he didn't know where he could start in at $70 a month (with additions)
and all found, at his age, after being nineteen years on one job. And
right here, he had to admit to himself, he didn't have so very much the
best of Heels of the navy-yard. So he looks it over again; fat as a
history of the Roman Empire, and hefted it and--well, there were young
apprentice-boys aboard that didn't weigh any more. But to make sure, he
lashes it to the butt-end of a fourteen-pound shell the gunner had once
given him for a desk-weight. He hated to lose that desk-weight, a relic
of the Santiago fight, but a good cause this--a good cause. He starts to
unscrew his air-port, but come to think, it was still daylight, and so
he waits for the shades of night to fall.
"Well, that night--three bells just gone in the mid-watch it was--the
marine guarding the patent life-buoy on the port side of the
quarter-deck, fell into a reverie. He ought to have been on the _qui
vive_, so to speak--alert, active, wide-awake, pacing his post briskly
of course, according to instructions; and if it was daylight when the
officer of the deck could see him, you betcher he would.
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