They sealed that note and put it together with a coin into the hands of a drum orderly. And after that there was nothing to do but wait in suspense and impatience for the momentous hours of evening, when the yearling class was to make one more effort to subdue "the B. J.-est plebe that ever struck the place."
Night came, as night always does, no matter how anxiously it is waited for. Mark and his friend Indian went on guard that afternoon from two to four; and soon after that came dress parade and the sunset gun, then supper and finally darkness at last. With eight o'clock the two went on once more.
Though Mark did not once relax his vigilance during the time from then till taps he was inclined to think that the attack upon him would not take place until his next watch, which began at two. For now there were numbers of people strolling about and hazing was decidedly unsafe. So sure was he of this that his allies did not even prepare their plot.
Mark's judgment proved to be correct; he marched back and forth along the path that marked his beat and no one offered to disturb him. What "deviling" was being done at that hour was of a milder sort, a sort that was not intended for such B. J. plebes as he.
Among the victims of this, however, was our unfortunate friend Indian. What happened to Indian happens to nearly all plebes at the present day. It is our purpose to describe it in this chapter.
Indian was a gullible, innocent sort of a lad; life was a solemn and serious business with him. Most plebes take their hazing as fun, rather unpleasant, but still nothing dangerous. With Indian on the other hand it was torture; he dreaded the yearlings as his mortal enemies, and to his poor miserable soul everything they did was aimed at his life.
This curious state of affairs the yearlings were not slow to discover, and the result had been that fully half the hazing that was done had fallen on the head of this unfortunate plebe. And one may readily believe that the merry cadets were waiting with indescribable glee for the first night when poor Joseph Smith turned out on sentry duty.
Sentry duty at the camp is of course a mere formality; no enemies are expected to attack West Point, and there is no necessity for an all-night guard. But it was precisely this fact that our friend could not understand, and that was where the fun came in.
To Indian, the sentry was put on guard to ward off some real and terrible danger. Everything that happened confirmed this view in his mind. In the first place the solemnity and businesslike reality he found in the guard tent impressed him. Then the sepulchral tones of the corporal who gave him instructions, and who, it may readily be believed, lost no opportunity to impress the gravity of the situation upon his charge and to frighten him more and more, strengthened his conviction. Then they gave him a gun, a heavy, dangerous-looking gun, with a cold-steel bayonet sharp as a knife, that made him see all sorts of harrowing visions of himself in the act of plunging it, all bloody, into the body of some gasping foe.
After that, with all these uncanny ideas in his head, they marched him solemnly out to his post and left him there alone in the darkness.