“This is addressed to me,” began Mark Mallory, obeying the request and sitting down. “But it’s really meant for the whole seven of us. And it’s interesting, as showing what the old cadets think of the tricks we bold plebes have been playing on them.”
“Who’s it from?”
“It’s from Wicks Merritt, the second classman I met here last year. He’s home on furlough for the summer, but some of the other cadets have written and told him about us, and what we’ve been doing. And this is what he says about it. Listen.
“Dear Mark: Whenever I sit down to write to you it seems to me I can think of nothing to say, but to marvel at the extraordinary rumpus you have kicked up at West Point. Every time I hear from there you are doing still more incredibly impossible acts, until I expect to hear next that you have been made superintendent or something. However, in this letter I really have something else to tell you about, but I shall put it off to the last and keep you in suspense.
“Well, I hear that, not satisfied with defying the yearlings to haze you, and actually keeping them from doing it, which is something no plebe has ever dared to dream of before, you have gone on to still further recklessness. They say that you have gotten half a dozen other plebes to back you up, and that, to cap the climax, you actually dared to go to one of the hops. Well, I do not know what to say to that; it simply takes my breath away. I should like to have been there to see him doing it. They say that Grace Fuller, the girl you saved from drowning, got all the girls to promise to dance with you, and that the end of the whole business was the yearlings stopped the music and the hop and left in disgust. I fairly gasp when I picture that scene.
“I hesitate to give an original person like you advice. You never heeded what I gave you anyway, but went right ahead in your own contrariness to do what you pleased. I guess you were right. But I want to warn you a little. By your unheard-of daring in going to that hop you have incurred the enmity of not only the yearlings, whom you have beaten at every turn, but also of the powerful first class as well. And they will never stop until they subdue you. I don’t know what they’ll try, but it will be something desperate, and you must stand the consequences. You’ll probably have to take turns fighting every man in the class. When I come back I expect to find you buried six feet deep in court-plaster.”
Mark looked up from the letter for a moment, and smiled.
“I wish the dear old chump could see me now,” he said.
Wicks’ prediction seemed nearly fulfilled. Mark’s face was bruised and bandaged; one shoulder was still immovable from a dislocation, and when he moved any other part of himself he did it with a cautious slowness that told of sundry aching joints.
“Yes,” growled one of the six listeners, a lad from Texas, with a curious cowboy accent. “Yes, hang it! But I reckon Wicks Merritt didn’t have any idea them ole cadets’d pile on to lick you all together. I tell you what, it gits me riled. Jes’ because you had the nerve to defy ’em and fight the feller that ordered you off that air hop floor, doggone ’em, they all had to pitch in and beat you.”