CHAPTER XXXVII.
"BABY."
A year had passed since Frank entered Fardale Military Academy—a year crowded with events and adventures such as made its memory both pleasant and painful.
The time of the June encampment had again arrived.
Frank was no longer a plebe, and the glistening chevrons on his sleeves told that the first year in the academy had not been wasted. He was now Cadet Corporal Merriwell.
The graduates had departed, and the furlough men were away at their homes.
A new squad of plebes had been admitted to the school, and the yearlings, mad with joy at being released from plebedom themselves, were trying every scheme their fertile brains could devise for making miserable the lives of their successors.
During the first two weeks that the plebes had been in the academy the opportunities for hazing them had been few; but immediately on getting into camp the mischievous lads who had suffered the year before, not a few of whom had sworn that nothing in the wide world—nothing, nothing, nothing!—could tempt them to molest a fourth-class man, lost no time in "getting after" the "new stiffs," as the plebes were sometimes called at Fardale.
The yearlings were eager to find fags among the plebes, and they generally succeeded in inducing the new boys to bring buckets of water, sweep the tent floors, make beds, clean up, and do all sorts of work which the older cadets should have done themselves and were supposed to do.