menace in that area, and scanning the air for non-existent enemy planes. My watch was the 12-to-4. He was assigned to a lookout post and I was to break him in. We were in the darkened mess hall about a quarter of an hour before midnight, getting our eyes dark-adapted and swallowing mugs of muddy coffee which was supposed to keep us from falling asleep on our feet in the silent, eventless four hours that faced us. As the new boy in the group, he felt lost and he showed it. I filled a mug of coffee at the urn and pushed it across the table to him, then filled one for myself. As I sat down on the bench across from him, his violent grimace caught my attention. He put down the mug, his face wrinkled with such distaste that I was reminded of a child making the acquaintance of castor oil.

"Not as good as the coffee you get at home?"

"Never drank coffee at home. We have a cow", and he grinned. It was a quick, bright grin, the most ingratiating grin you ever saw. Somehow it made a person out of just-another-human-being. Suddenly I felt I knew him and at the same instant I knew he was worth knowing.

It was not long before I discovered that this boy was a lot different from most kids fresh out of boot camp. For one thing, he was a quick learner. Caught on fast to the routine of look-out procedure. It was a real pleasure not to have to explain everything a dozen times. For another thing, he read. Books, that is. He must have had a dozen paperbacks in his seabag when he came on board, and every couple of days I noticed that he started a new one. Not sex stories, but the standard books which came out when paperbacks were first published back around 1940 and which continued in print during the early years of the war: Lost Horizon, Wuthering Heights, Dodsworth, Return of the Native, A Tale of Two Cities. Compared with his comic-reading, simian peers, his was an effortless superiority. He stood out because he was different, better, if you please. Not because he ever attempted to stand out.

In fact you never saw a more modest youngster than he was. We had no evaporators on our little ship, and on our long, slow convoy run, fresh water was rationed. The showers in the head were turned on at specified hours only. He was obviously out of place among the sky-larking naked men who wet down, soaped up, and rinsed off in the rapid but efficient procedure experienced sailors use when fresh water is not in unlimited supply. I was sure he had never been naked in a group, at least not until his experience with the doctors at the draft board. In his case, it was not so much embarrassment as reserve. He was obviously trying not to see the nakedness around him and was just as obviously trying not to be conscious of his own nudity. Not that he had anything to be ashamed of. His was one of the leanest, longest lithest bodies I've ever seen on a teen-ager. It was the natural build of a swimmer or a gymnast, or a farmer. Every muscle was there from actual use, a solid chest with small pink nipples, and a tautly muscled abdomen rippling down to the external obliques which tapered in gentle grooves to the groin. It was a hard, smooth beauty, completely without the knottiness or bunchiness of the weight-lifter. He was so lovely a boy that I knew my feeling for him, which so far had been merely protective toward “the green kid on my watch," could easily intensify into a genuine erotic interest.

Four days out to sea, we learned that this was to be the longest convoy run yet. One of the tankers broke down, it was nothing but a rusty bucket anyhow. The CARNELIAN was chosen from the escorting ships to remain behind and guide the crippled tanker into port once sufficient repairs had been made to get underway again. It meant adding days to a convoy run which was already in

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