“I am sure of it.”
“Then what in the name of sense did he propose it for?” was the indignant inquiry.
“For fun—just because he wanted to show us that he could think up something in five minutes if he set about it in dead earnest. If he had had the least idea that we would so readily fall in with his scheme, he would not have said a word about it.”
“He wanted to hear himself talk, did he? If I really believed it, I would report him.”
“Don’t do that,” said Enoch, in some alarm, “for if you do you will spoil everything. We don’t care whether he was in earnest or not. He has told us how we can see some fun, and if we are sharp we will go ahead with it. What we want to guard against is, that he don’t slip out, and leave us to stand the court-martial alone.”
“Fall in for supper!” shouted the quartermaster sergeant; and the order put a stop to the conversation.
Enoch and Jones could not remember that they had ever been more excited than they were that night. As self-constituted spies they were about to undertake something that no boy in that school had ever before had the hardihood to attempt. They knew the temper of the students in the first class, and they knew, too, that they all belonged to a secret society that was as old as the academy itself. Its members were scattered all over the country. Its signs, grips, and pass-words, and all the other mysterious things belonging to it, had always been so closely guarded, that no one except a first-class boy had ever been able to obtain the faintest clue to them. A few inquisitive fellows had been bold enough to try it, but they were sorry for it afterward. They never did find out what passed inside the doors of the lodge-room, not even after they became members of the first class; and besides being forever debarred from all the rights and privileges they would otherwise have enjoyed, they were soused in the big pond until all the curiosity and a good deal of their breath was washed out of them. Enoch and Jones knew all this, and yet they were about to go a step farther. They were going to allow themselves to be locked in one of the recitation rooms with all the boys in the first class, and Jones, after he had taken time to consider the situation, began to feel as if he were on the point of entering a den of lions. Of course, he knew that none of the ceremonies of the lodge-room would be enacted at a business meeting, but still it was possible that some of the students, believing themselves to be alone, might let fall some words or phrases that outsiders were not entitled to hear. He talked these matters over with Enoch after supper, and would have been delighted to see some signs of wavering or hesitancy on the part of his companion. But Enoch’s eye lighted up and his face flushed, as the perils of the undertaking were portrayed to him, and the longer Jones talked, the brighter grew the light and the deeper the flush.
“I don’t want to be black-balled when I get into the first class,” said Jones, as a clincher. “Why, just think of it, Enoch! Some of the best officers in our army and navy belong to that society, and if I should happen to meet any of them after I leave school, I should like to associate with them on equal terms.”
“I don’t want to be black-balled either,” returned Enoch, “and, what’s more, I don’t intend to be. You need have no fears on that score, because we are not going to allow ourselves to be caught in the recitation room. I tell you, Jones,” exclaimed Enoch, growing enthusiastic, “it will be the biggest thing that was ever thought of, and we must go through with it. The tuckout will be well worth eating—Mack and his crowd don’t do things by halves—and if we succeed in stealing it, they will know in a minute that some of their secrets have leaked out; but won’t it puzzle them to locate that leak?”
“Not if they find us hidden under the benches in the room in which they are holding their meeting,” replied Jones.