“His! For Heaven’s sake, how?”
“Run off with it! He never uses it at night!”
And then there were more hysterics.
CHAPTER XXIII.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S FEAST.
“Eleven o’clock and all’s we-ell!”
It was the call of the sentry ringing through the silent woods and still more silent camp.
The sentries that night were marching under very different circumstances from the usual ones. No broad paths and moonlit, tree-shaded avenues; no gas lamps and spacious tents; but, instead of these, a small clearing, with the smallest of small shelter tents lit only by smoldering camp-fires, and beyond these a dark wood with sentry beats that ran uphill and down, over fallen logs and brush. Guard duty in the woods was a far less pleasant business than at Camp McPherson.
It was easier, too, for a person to pass one of the sentries here, for the latter could not see from one end of his beat to the other, small though it was; “the orders of the night” had accordingly called for extra watchfulness.
However, as we know, cadets have ways of getting the better of official orders. A certain merry crowd of yearlings who were just then stealing silently about the grounds were not the least alarmed for fear the sentry might challenge them; they had it all arranged beforehand and they vanished silently into the woods without their comrade on duty even “seeing” them. The reader scarcely needs to be told that it was Bull and his friends.