The speaker was Bull Harris, and he was sitting on the steps of the library building along with half a dozen classmates, excitedly and angrily discussing the fight.
"Now I tell you Mark Mallory's got to be put out of this place in a week," continued the first speaker. "And I don't care how it's done, either, fair or foul."
"That's just what I say, too!" chimed in Baby Edwards. "He's got to be put out in a week!"
Bull Harris smiled benignly upon his toadying echo, while the rest of the gang nodded approvingly.
"I'm sure everybody agrees that he's got to be taken down," put in somebody else. "The only trouble is I don't see how on earth it is to be done."
"That's the worst of it!" snarled Bull. "That fellow Mallory seems to get the best of us everything we try; confound him!"
"I'm sure such a thing has never been known at West Point," said another. "Just think of it! Why, it's the talk of the post, and everybody's laughing at us, and the plebes are getting bolder every minute. One of them actually dared to turn up his nose at me to-day. Think of it—at me—a yearling, and he a vile beast!"
"It's perfectly awful," groaned Bull. "Perfectly awful! Imagine a crowd of yearlings allowing themselves to be stopped while hazing a plebe—stopped, mind you, by half as many plebes—and then to make it a thousand times worse to have the fellow they were hazing taken away!"
"And the yearlings all chased back to camp by a half-crazy Texan," chimed in another, who hadn't been there and so could afford to mention unpleasant details.
"Yet what can we do?" cried Baby. "We can't offer to fight him. He's as good as licked Billy Williams, and Bill's the best man we could put up. That Mallory's a regular terror."