“I suppose so,” grumbled Bosworth, “if you can call it all right to have your legs and arms frozen off.”
“Seen anything or heard anything?”
Bosworth hesitated. The instructions of the leaders had been definite, “Signal at the first suspicious sound!” When the voices aroused him, his first impulse had been to give the preconcerted signal; but fear of being made the centre of a scuffle on the roof, or of being compelled to hold the fort at the foot of the lightning-rod until classmates gathered to the rescue, had kept his lips sealed.
“Well, what’s the matter with you?” snapped Dearborn. “Didn’t you hear what I said? You act as if you were asleep.”
“No, not a sound.”
“It seems to take a long time to get it out.”
Bosworth roused himself. “When you’ve been freezing as long as I have, you won’t be so anxious to talk yourself.”
“Give me the coat then,” replied Dearborn, grabbing it without more ado. “You can have it in the morning. Now clear out and go to bed. This is the hour when they come, if they come at all.”
So the watch changed hourly through the still, cold night. The last man aloft descended at six, just as the sun was peeping above the horizon. The cooks were already hard at work in the big kitchen of Carter Hall. Soon the boys who cared for the yard would be at their early tasks, and with the dormitories gradually waking it was no longer advisable to maintain the sentinel on the roof. Halfway between the Academy and Carter, the retiring guard met his two successors, who were to continue the watch between six and seven from the concealment of the gymnasium porch. Together the three looked proudly up at the bunch of white that hung limp between the east and north arms of the Academy weather-vane.
“There she is all right,” said Strout. “With the first puff of wind she’ll blow out and show herself.”