"Just what he is!" cried the Baby. "I'd like to knock him over."
And after that there was silence again, broken only by the roll of a drum that meant dinner.
"Well," was Bull's final word, as the crowd set out for camp, "it's unfortunate, I must say. But it won't make the least bit of difference. Mallory'll get his demerits sure as he's alive, and Fischer's interference won't matter in the least."
"That's what!" cried the rest of them.
CHAPTER XXV.
A SWIMMING MATCH.
The manner in which the cadets dine has not as yet been described in these pages; perhaps here is just as good a place as any to picture the historic mess hall where Lee and Grant and Sherman once dined, and toward which on that Saturday afternoon were marching not only the group we have just left, but also the object of all their dislike, the B. J. plebe who fell in behind the cadets as the battalion swung past barracks.
The cadets march to mess hall; they march to every place they go as a company. The building itself is just south of the "Academic" and barracks; it is built of gray stone, and forcibly reminds the candid observer of a jail. They tell stories at West Point of credulous candidates who have "swallowed" that, and believed that the cadet battalion was composed of disobedient cadets, about to be locked up in confinement.
There is a flight of iron steps in the center, and at the foot of these steps, three times every day, the battalion breaks ranks and dissolves into a mob of actively bounding figures. Upon entering, the cadets do not take seats, but stand behind their chairs, and await the order, "Company A, take seats!" "Company B, take seats!" and so on. The plebes, who, up to this time, are still a separate company, come last, as usual; they are seated by themselves, at one side of the dining-room.
The tables seat twenty-two persons, ten on a side, and one at each end. The cadets are placed according to rank, and they always sit in the same seats. The tables are divided down the center by an imaginary line, each part being a "table"; first class men sit near the head, and so on down to the plebes, who find themselves at the center (that is, after they have moved into camp, and been "sized" and assigned to companies; before that they are "beasts," herded apart, as has been said).