"I'll have to tell you some other time, Larry," was Dick's answer. "There has been trouble and Captain Putnam wants to get at the bottom of it."
"Somebody said you had been locked up for robbing a jewelry shop."
"There has been a robbery and we were suspected. But we were not locked up."
As soon as he was able to do so, Captain Putnam learned the names of the twelve cadets who had been on picket duty between midnight and six o'clock that morning. These cadets were marched to one of the classrooms and interviewed one at a time in the captain's private office.
From the first six cadets to go in but little was learned. One cadet, when told that something of a very serious nature had occurred—something which was not a mere school lark and could not be overlooked—confessed that he had allowed two cadets to slip out of camp and come back again with two capfuls of apples taken from a neighboring orchard.
"But I can't tell their names, Captain Putnam," the cadet added.
"How long were they gone, Beresford?"
"Not over fifteen or twenty minutes."
"Did you see the apples?"
"Yes, sir, I—er—ate two of them."