“Officer, he’s in again,” said Melvin.
“It takes more than a sprained ankle to keep Tom off the poetry stuff,” laughed Fred. “Nothing less than an axe will do the business.”
“How did you get all this fodder up here?” asked Slim.
“I gave Jimmy, the laundryman, half a dollar for the use of his hand cart,” explained Ned, “and he sent his boy up with it, with directions to wait down on the other side of the gymnasium. Then I slipped out between supper time and study period, and smuggled them in without any one’s seeing me. The janitor nearly caught me, though. Big Sluper was just turning into the corridor as I got the last thing in and shut the wardrobe door.”
“We want to look out for Beansey, though,” he warned them. “He’s monitor this week, and you know how strict he is.”
“Beansey,” as the boys called him, because he came from Boston, was a monitor and assistant instructor. He was very lank and solemn, and extremely precise in his manner of speech. In the matter of discipline, he was almost as severe as Dr. Rally himself, and the boys sometimes referred to him as “Hardtack’s understudy.”
“Who cares for Beansey?” said the irrepressible Teddy. “If he comes, we’ll sic the cheese on him. It smells strong enough to down him. What kind is it, Ned? Brie, Roquefort, Limburger?”
“It is pretty strong,” admitted Ned. “When I ordered it from the grocer, he turned to one of his clerks and said: ‘Unchain Number Eight.’”
The laugh that followed was interrupted by a warning:
“Lay low. Here he comes now.”