“I don’t care so much how he got in,” said Rodney, “but there he is and we must get him out, somehow.”
At that very hour, the breakfast room at the House of Refuge was full of hungry boys but it was wonderfully quiet. There was a slight rattle of crockery, and now and then a low-spoken word from one of the officers, but the eyes of those watchful guardians were everywhere and the rules of order were thoroughly enforced. Beyond a doubt, this also was a valuable part of the schooling the boys were getting but it was a kind of restraint and was in danger of being mistaken for oppression. It is one of the traditions of the House that all of the half-way rebellions among the young fellows have broken out in the dining-room or in the schoolroom, where the discipline is so complete, and never in any manner out of doors, no matter how severe might be the drill of the parade-ground.
Jim, at his own table, was willing enough to be silent, then and there, but he was ready to burst with his great secret and was anxious to find somebody, the right boy, to tell it to. He thought them over, one by one, for he knew them all, but it was not easy to decide among them. He was compelled, at all events, to wait for a proper opportunity, and that could not come for hours, yet. His next experiences must necessarily come to him at his type-setting work, at his “case” in the printing room.
This was a light and pleasant place to be in. It had altogether an air of regular business and not at all of restriction, unless it might be in the clock work precision of whatever was going on and in the fact that there was no talking, no communication, among the many busy “typos.”
Jim had a slip of printed “copy” put before him, on his case, and the moment he saw it he remarked to himself:
“Star Spangled Banner?—If I haven’t had to set that up four times! I know where that comes from. The Superintendent is always telling us we are Americans. Going to be citizens. So is the Military Instructor. They’re both naval officers—I’m an American, but loads of the other fellows are not. It’s my flag—I’ll set it up——”
There was something in it. A great deal more teaching than he or any of the others knew was in the flag, the starry flag of freedom, that was carried at the head of the parade-ground battalion; that was displayed in the larger rooms of the House; that hung over the principal’s platform in the schoolroom; and that so finely ornamented the handsome lecture room in the main building. It had something to do with the other teachings and with some of the traditions that passed around among the boys. How some had gone out from that place to be sailors in the navy; others to be soldiers and even officers in the army; and how that and everything else, to them and all other boys, depended on good behavior.
Jim was thinking about it, now, but his uppermost thought was that sailors went all over the world, into far off seas, into foreign lands, in freedom; and that soldiers, especially cavalry soldiers, rode across the plains and among the mountains, seeing and doing wonderful things, in freedom. O, how he longed for something wild and dashing and adventurous,—something like the very dash for freedom that he was even now looking forward to and trying to plan!
He naturally supposed that his undertaking, if he should make it, would have to do with the various kinds of persons near him, and would as soon have thought of China, as of a boy and girl who were looking at a goat, in a second story window, over in the city. He was not in their thoughts either, and Millie’s next remark was:
“Mother says you can go through our house as much as you want to. She won’t look the back door——”