FullReads

There was never the faintest danger of his being found deficient in studies, but there was ever the glaring prospect of his being discharged “on demerit.” Mr. McKay and the regulations of the United States Military Academy had been at loggerheads from the start.

And yet, frank, jolly, and generous as he was in all intercourse with his comrades, there was never a time when this young gentleman could be brought to see that in such matters he was the arbiter of his own destiny. Like the Irishman whose first announcement on setting foot on American soil was that he was “agin the government,” Billy McKay believed that regulations were made only to oppress; that the men who drafted such a code were idiots, and that those whose duty it became to enforce it were simply spies and tyrants, resistance to whom was innate virtue. He was forever ignoring or violating some written or unwritten law of the Academy; was frequently being caught in the act, and was invariably ready to attribute the resultant report to ill luck which pursued no one else, or to a deliberate persecution which followed him forever. Every six months he had been on the verge of dismissal, and now, a fortnight from the final examination, with a margin of only six demerit to run on, Mr. Billy McKay had just been read out in the daily list of culprits or victims as “Shouting from window of barracks to cadets in area during study hours,–three forty-five and four P.M.”

There was absolutely no excuse for this performance. The regulations enjoined silence and order in barracks during “call to quarters.” It had been raining a little, and he was in hopes there would be no battalion drill, in which event he would venture on throwing off his uniform and spreading himself out on his bed with a pipe and a novel,–two things he dearly loved. Ten minutes would have decided the question legitimately for him, but, being of impatient temperament, he could not wait, and, catching sight of the adjutant and the senior captain coming from the guard-house, Mr. McKay sung out in tones familiar to every man within ear-shot,–

“Hi, Jim! Is it battalion drill?”

The adjutant glanced quickly up,–a warning glance as he could have seen,–merely shook his head, and went rapidly on, while his comrade, the cadet first captain, clinched his fist at the window and growled between his set teeth, “Be quiet, you idiot!”

But poor Billy persisted. Louder yet he called,–

“Well–say–Jimmy! Come up here after four o’clock. I’ll be in confinement, and can’t come out. Want to see you.”

And the windows over at the office of the commandant being wide open, and that official being seated there in consultation with three or four of his assistants, and as Mr. McKay’s voice was as well known to them as to the corps, there was no alternative. The colonel himself “confounded” the young scamp for his recklessness, and directed a report to be entered against him.

And now, as Mr. Stanley is betaking himself to his post at the guard-house, his heart is heavy within him because of this new load on his comrade’s shoulders.

“How on earth could you have been so careless, Billy?” he had asked him as McKay, fuming and indignant, was throwing off his accoutrements in his room on the second floor.

“How’d I know anybody was over there?” was the boyish reply. “It’s just a skin on suspicion anyhow. Lee couldn’t have seen me, nor could anybody else. I stood way back by the clothes-press.”

“There’s no suspicion about it, Billy. There isn’t a man that walks the area that doesn’t know your voice as well as he does Jim Pennock’s. Confound it! You’ll get over the limit yet, man, and break your–your mother’s heart.”

“Oh, come now, Stan! You’ve been nagging me ever since last camp. Why’n thunder can’t you see I’m doing my best? Other men don’t row me as you do, or stand up for the ‘tacks.’ I tell you that fellow Lee never loses a chance of skinning me: he takes chances, by gad, and I’ll make his eyes pop out of his head when he reads what I’ve got to say about it.”