The days passed more quickly now, at least to Mrs. Taylor, though Tom thought each one was forty-eight hours long. He planned to go to New York by train from Chester, and as he would arrive in the metropolis in the evening, he would stay at a hotel there, and go on to Highland Falls the next morning. Highland Falls is a village a mile below West Point, and there most of the prospective candidates stay before reporting for their examinations. There are plenty of hotel accommodations there.
Finally the day came. Tom said good-bye to his mother, not without a choking sensation in his throat, and he had to turn his head away and blow his nose rather more often than seemed absolutely necessary. She did not go to the station with him, as she feared she would break down, and she did not want to give way for Tom’s sake.
“Good-bye,” she faltered. “I—I know you’ll do well, Tom.”
“It won’t be for want of trying,” he answered. And a little later he found himself at the station, watching the train pull in that was to take him on the first stage of his trip to historic West Point.
CHAPTER VII
GETTING READY
Our hero was excited, and no wonder. He had gone through many unusual experiences since he had begun to think of going to West Point, and now he was on the verge of new ones. He was in a sort of daze. Matters followed each other so closely that there was little time between to think properly of them.
“But there’s one thing sure,” he thought to himself, as he sat looking from the car window as he was being whirled along his way, “there is one thing sure, and that is that I have the chance I’ve been wanting so long. If I don’t make the most of it, it will be my own fault.”
He ventured to look about him more calmly now, thinking perhaps he might see some one in the car whom he knew. But a quick glance through the coach did not disclose any one, though he noticed two or three lads about his own age, talking and laughing together.
Tom thought he would like to know them, and he wondered if, by any chance, they could be in his position—a “plebe” going up to West Point for the all-important examination. Then another thought came to our hero.
Where was Clarence Hawkesbury? He, too, was supposed to go to take the examination on the day Tom reported, which would be the morrow. Where was Clarence?