"Whom do you mean by us and we?" demanded Marcy, who had listened in silence to this speech, which was addressed to the boys gathered in the hall rather than to himself. "You don't live in South Carolina."
"No, but I do," said Ed Billings, elbowing his way to the foot of the stairs on which Bob had perched himself when he began his address. "I go with my State, and you will have to go with yours or show yourself a traitor."
"A traitor to what?" inquired Marcy.
"To your State," Billings almost shouted.
"My State hasn't seceded yet; but if she does, and I go with her, how will I stand in regard to the old flag—the one that waves over this academy?"
Billings tried to answer, but his voice was drowned in the wild shouts that arose from the assembled students.
"Haul the flag down!" they yelled, almost as one boy.
"No, no," cried some of the more reasonable ones, after they had taken time to think twice. "Let's wait upon the colonel and request him to have it taken down."
"There's one thing I want you all to bear in mind," added a tall fellow, who hearing the tumult in the hall had come back to see what it was all about. "Those colors shall not come down without the colonel's orders, and I'll mix up promiscuous with any chap who lays an ugly hand upon them."
So it seemed that the old flag had defenders even here; and although it may not have had a very sincere friend in the person of the head of the school, he positively refused to order it down, or to permit the students to pull it down. It would be time enough to attend to that when they learned what the State was going to do. The boys went away disappointed; but the most of them believed that the day would come when they could work their sweet will with that "emblem of tyranny," as they had already begun to call it.