“Thank you, sir. You know we have some marks against us,” spoke up Dan.
“I was thinking of that. Let me see. There appears to be some doubt about those extra duty tours—I mean to say as to whether you men were wholly in the wrong. Have you any reason to suspect that others were trying to get you into trouble?”
“Yes, sir; we have had reason to suspect as much,” answered Dan after an instant’s hesitation.
“Whom did you suspect?”
“There can be no harm now, sir, in saying that we suspected the fellow Flink.”
“Yet you made no report of it?”
“How could we, sir? We had little on which to base our suspicions, and besides it did not seem the manly thing to do, to carry tales about one’s shipmates.”
“He’s the fellow, sir, who threw the pie,” spoke up Hickey.
“What’s that?”
“Threw the pie.” Sam did not heed the warning look from his companion. “The day we entered the training school.”