“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 with his hand on the knob. The moment he turned the knob the door flew open and he was in the full sweep of the wind. The deck was deserted. The wet ropes strung along it shivered dismally in the wind. Every other moment came the rattle of spray, that rose up in white fringy trees to windward and smashed against him like hail. Without closing the door he crept forward along the deck, clinging as hard as he could to the icy rope. Beyond the spray he could see huge marbled green waves rise in constant succession out of the mist. The roar of the wind in his ears confused him and terrified him. It seemed ages before he reached the door of the forward house that opened on a passage that smelt of drugs; and breathed out air, where men waited in a packed line, thrown one against the other by the lurching of the boat, to get into the dispensary. The roar of the wind came to them faintly, and only now and then the hollow thump of a wave against the bow. “You sick?” a man asked Fuselli. “Naw, I'm not sick; but Sarge sent me to get some stuff for some guys that's too sick to move.” “An awful lot o' sickness on this boat.” “Two fellers died this mornin' in that there room,” said another man solemnly, pointing over his shoulder with a jerk of the thumb. “Ain't buried 'em yet. It's too rough.” “What'd they die of?” asked Fuselli eagerly. “Spinal somethin'....” “Menegitis,” broke in a man at the end of the line. “Say, that's awful catchin' ain't it?” “It sure is.”