Thud! Smack!
“You will bite my finger, eh? Take that, you miserable plebe. I say, Crane, just hold his head while I beat a reveille on his mug.”
“Wait a bit until we get him served and spliced, Dodge. He’s kicking like a steering wheel in a nor’east gale. There, that’s it. Another turn about his arms and we’ll have the rat dead to rights. Now, Mr. Nanny Gote, how do you like it?”
The speaker, a tall, heavily-built youth in a naval cadet uniform, grinned complacently into the upturned face of a youngster lying stretched out upon the orlop deck of the Naval Academy practice ship Monongahela.
The victim, for such his uncomfortable position and bound arms proclaimed him to be, was much younger than his chief tormentor, and was, moreover, slight and rather delicate in appearance.
His white face indicated his alarm, and he looked up pleadingly at the group surrounding him. He could not speak, perforce, for a wad of spun oakum filled the cavity of his mouth, fastened there by a tarry length of rope.
“Nanny,” as he was called by his companions, was a member of the plebe class at the United States Naval Academy. Those tormenting him were of the third, or hazing, class at the same institute. There were six in the group, and they represented about the most vicious element in their class.
Crane, the ringleader, “had it in,” to use his own words, for all plebes, and he had started out that night to haze a few just to keep his hand in.
The Monongahela was lying at anchor twenty miles below the academy, from which she had sailed early that morning on the usual summer practice cruise, as already related in another volume, entitled “Clif, the Naval Cadet.”