Having taken up a position between the recumbent figure and the path that led from his beat to the academy, Dick brought his musket to “arms port” and sung out, in his loudest tones: “Who comes there?” immediately following up his challenge with lusty calls for the corporal of the guard No. 5. The last words had hardly left his lips when the prostrate boy sprang to his feet, and coughing up the snow which had filled his mouth and got into his throat when he made his sudden plunge into the drift, ran toward the academy with surprising swiftness. Dick heard that cough, and it affected him very strangely. He stood with open mouth and eyes, gazing in the direction in which the boy had disappeared, while his musket trembled in his grasp, and his face grew almost as white as the snow around him.
“Now I’ve done it,” he said to himself, with no little alarm. “I’ve gone and called the corporal for one of our own boys. What in the world shall I do? Tom and Clarence will read me out of their good books, and I shall have no one to be friends with, for those high-toned lads in the upper classes won’t look at me. Well, if trouble comes of it, they can just blame Duncan. He told me to stop the ninth boy, and I know I didn’t make any mistake in counting them. But what shall I say to the corporal? That’s what bothers me.”
Dick was obliged to come to a decision on this point very speedily, for just then the door of the guard-room was thrown open, and the corporal came out and hurried toward him.
“What’s the matter, sentry?” he asked, as soon as he had approached within speaking distance.
“Some fellow has just run by me,” was Dick’s reply.
“Whew!” whistled the corporal. “Running the guard has begun rather early in the term, hasn’t it? Who was he?”
“I don’t know,” answered Dick, and he told the truth.
“Whom did he look like?”
“I don’t know that, either. You can’t tell one student from another in the dark, when they are all dressed alike.”
“Then why didn’t you catch him and find out who he was?”