They were ugly enough looking fellows externally. The clothes they wore were old and tough-looking, turned up at the collars. Mark had in his free hand a dark lantern, and Texas was clutching in his pocket a heavy forty-four caliber which he meant to use. They had masks, every one of them, or such masks as they could make out of their handkerchiefs. And anybody who saw them stealing across the grass to the hotel grounds would have been very much alarmed indeed.
Fortunately it was a cloudy night, black as pitch.
Even the white trousers of the lonely sentries who paced the walks about the camp were scarcely distinguishable. The hotel was a black, indistinct mass looming up in front of them. The chances of recognition under such circumstances were few, the plebes realized with a sense of relief.
Once hiding close under the shadow of the building they wasted but little time in consultation. It was a creepy sort of business altogether, but then they had started, and so there was nothing to do but go right ahead. Most of them had recovered from their first nervousness at this crisis anyway, of course excepting poor Indian, who had seated himself flat on the ground in a state of collapse. Dewey was behind him ready to grab him by the mouth in case one of Indian’s now famous howls of terror should show any signs of breaking loose.
Texas and Mark meanwhile were proceeding calmly to business. The pillars were very wide and high, and Mark foresaw trouble in getting himself up them with his crippled arm. And there was still more trouble in the case of the gentleman from Indianapolis, whose fat little legs wouldn’t reach halfway around. The difficulty was fortunately removed by the finding of a short ladder in back of the house. A very few minutes later the seven anxious plebes were lying upon the piazza roof.
They wormed their way up close to the wall of the building where they were safe from observation. And while Mark devoted himself to keeping Indian quiet Texas set out to reconnoiter. Poor Indian didn’t want to come, and worse yet, he didn’t want to stay. He felt safer in the hotel as a burglar than all alone outside in the darkness, and he had an idea that even Camp McPherson wasn’t safe without Mark. “Alas, poor Indian!”
Meanwhile as to Texas. Did you ever walk on a tin roof? If you have you can imagine what a soul-stirring, ear-splitting operation it is, at midnight, especially when you are in burglar’s costume, with a revolver in one hand and a dark lantern in the other. Every single individual bit of tin on the flooring seemed to have a new and original kind of sound to make, and the six watchers quailed at every one of them.
Texas was hunting for the window that led into the hall of the building. The room they meant to enter was unfortunately on the other side. They had to force the window, creep down the hall and get into that room. If they could simply have entered it from a window, they might have gotten out of this foolish scrape a good deal more simply than they did.
Texas managed to locate the window without much trouble, and fortunately he found it open. He beckoned the others silently, and they crept one by one down to the place, Indian making twice as much noise as any one because he weighed more. At any rate they climbed through the window and into the lonely hall of the hotel, where they stood and listened anxiously. They had not been very quiet, but they did not believe they had awakened any one; and after this they could be quieter.
They would have been very much scared and terrified plebes, more so, all of them, than was Master Smith now, if they could have known the true state of affairs. For they had awakened some one. And though they had not the least suspicion of it, a pair of sharp eyes had been watching their every move.