U.S.S. _Texarkhoma_,
Hong-kong, China,
Date So and so.

"'Respectfully returned, with the information that the need of the
section of hose-pipe no longer exists, for the reason that we
filled the _Savannah's_ tanks with it seven years ago.

"'Very respectfully,

"'Your obedient servant,'

"and signs his own name and rating, Percy Algernon Willoughby--call him
that--Chief Yeoman, U.S. Navy, and glues that on behind the other
sixty-seven endorsements and gloats over it, and for a few minutes feels
like a bureau chief himself. Then for another minute or two he thought
of mailing it to them. 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