"Hang those boys!" roared the irate teacher. "Oh, what I wouldn't do to them if I had them here!" He hopped around the room first on one foot and then on the other, shivering as he did so. As was usual, the steam throughout the building had been turned off some time before, so that the apartment was quite cold.
"We had better scatter," warned Jack. "He may open the door at any instant and find us here."
"Right you are!" answered Randy, and then, unable to resist the temptation, he bent down and shouted through the keyhole: "Pleasant dreams, Professor! I hope you enjoyed the ice-water!"
Then all of the cadets fled to their rooms, and in less than five minutes each of them was undressed and safe in bed.
If ever there was an angry man, it was Asa Lemm at that particular moment. He had to change all his night clothing, and then don a bathrobe and slippers and go down below once more and get some of the hired help to clean up his room and take away the wet mattress of his bed. A dry mattress was substituted from a vacant bedroom, but it was all of half an hour before this work was accomplished; and in the meantime the professor stormed around, threatening about everything he could imagine.
"I'll have the law on them! I'll have every one of them locked up!" he said to Colonel Colby. "It's an outrage that I should be treated in this fashion."
"It is certainly a most unpleasant occurrence, Professor," agreed the master of the Hall. "But boys will be boys—you know that as well as I do. I can remember when I went to school, I loved to play practical jokes, and they were not always kindly jokes, either. But as for having these boys arrested, or anything of that sort, that, I think, would be going too far. We can punish them enough right here—that is, provided we can find out who they are."
"I don't believe in such jokes!"
"Neither do I—now that I have grown older. But I did believe in them when I was a boy."
"The trouble with this school is, the discipline is not strict enough," snapped Asa Lemm. "If we are not more strict, the cadets will degenerate into nothing but rowdies and hoodlums."