“Well, Frank, if we are ever lucky enough to get on a battleship that’s sent to Bermuda, I suppose we’ll see such fish as these in their native waters.”
“Yes, it would be great!” agreed Frank, and as he spoke he noticed that a man standing near him and his brother looked at them in a peculiar and sharp manner. Frank did not like the looks of the fellow, and he was even less pleased when the man moved a little nearer and addressed them.
“Are you lads from some ship?” he asked. “If you are, shake! I’m from the _Kentucky_ myself, on shore leave, and it does my heart good to meet a couple of the boys in blue. What’s your berth?”
“We haven’t any,” Frank said, hoping to pass the matter off lightly and leave the man, for he did not like his face or manner.
“Excuse me,” the fellow went on, “but I thought I heard youse say something about a battleship—”
“Oh, that was just talk,” broke in Ned, more open and ingenuous than his brother. “We’ve been talking of getting on a battleship for some time, but I don’t suppose we ever shall.”
“Well, it’s a great life, believe me!” exclaimed the man. “I’ve put in eight years of it. Hard work, but lots of fun, too. I’ve seen these fish swimming around so thick that you’d think there wasn’t enough water for ’em,” and he waved his hand—not a very clean hand, Frank thought—toward a tank of angel fish.
“Have you been in Bermuda?” asked Ned, eagerly.
“Lots of times,” boasted the other. “Two or three times the ships I was on were sent there on cruises. It’s a great life. Are you boys stopping in New York?”
“For a while, yes,” assented Frank, not wishing to give too much information about themselves to a stranger. He well knew the wiles of some of the unprincipled men of New York.
“I took you for strangers,” the fellow went on, and there came a queer gleam in his eyes.
“We’re Columbia students,” put in Ned, who was very proud of the fact. And then, like a pang, it came to him, that he and his brother would have to give up their places at the university. No longer would they be able to keep on with their studies there. Well, there was no use in vain regrets.
“I thought youse looked like college boys,” went on the man who claimed to be a sailor. “But what’s the trouble? Flunked in your studies that you want to get on a battleship? You can’t be officers first crack after you enlist, you know.”