“I wish you would be good enough to keep me posted. I didn’t see any fun at all last term, and I am ready for anything now.”
“I can’t promise to do that until I have consulted the other fellows,” was Lester’s reply. “But I will speak to them and see what they think about it.”
“I’ve got plenty of money, and I am ready to spend it, too.”
“But the rules say that you must give it to the superintendent for safe keeping.”
“I can take care of it myself. I gave him a little, just for a blind, and the rest I shall keep by me. That’s what you did last term.”
“Yes; and if it had not been for Mack, and a few other boys I don’t at all like, I should have lost the last red cent of it. I wish that somebody else had recovered it for me, for I don’t like to feel that I am under obligations to Mack and his crowd.”
It was plain that Ross, having become thoroughly disheartened by his failure to win promotion at the last examination, had abandoned all hope of ever being anything better than a private, and had fully made up his mind to cast his lot with Lester Brigham and the rest of the law-breakers.
“He don’t care a snap of his finger for the fun he thinks he is going to see,” soliloquized Lester, who, having put on his uniform, left the room to report his arrival to the adjutant, “but he wants revenge on the teachers and on the students who received warrants and commissions. How he imagines that he is going to hurt either of them by breaking the rules, I can’t understand; he will find that he will hurt himself instead. Well, I don’t know that it is any of my business. I shall say a good word for him to Enoch and the rest, because he’s got money. They made pretty free with my pocket-book last term, and now they can look to somebody else for their pies and pancakes.”
By the time it began to grow dark, all the students who were to attend the academy during the year had reported for duty. There was guard-mount that night, it being the 14th of January, and the next morning the roar of the field-piece announced that the business for the next twelve months had begun in earnest. And a dreary year indeed it proved to be to some of the students. Jones and the other discontented fellows in the second class, often declared, with no little disgust and indignation, that they had never seen anything like it. Cony Ryan was often heard to make the same remark. His little parlor, which had so frequently echoed to the songs and speeches of the guard-runners, was now entirely deserted of evenings, although Lester and Enoch and some of their particular friends occasionally dropped in on Saturday afternoon to eat pancakes and maple syrup, and to mourn with him over the days that were past.
“We can’t help it, Cony,” Enoch once said to him. “It is all Don Gordon’s fault and Bert’s. Don is reported to have said, when he shook hands with Mack at the beginning of the term, that he should consider himself unworthy of the position he holds if there were a single instance of successful guard-running this year. That is always the way with these bad fellows, you know. Whenever they turn over a new leaf, and do it in dead earnest, they go just as far the other way. They become enthusiasts and radicals.”