“When you get time,” put in Dick dryly, “you might as well tell us when you reached Gridley.”

“After ten o’clock last night,” supplied Harry.  “Of course, we had to go home first.  But this morning we set out to find you.  We knew, of course, that any place would be likelier than your homes, so we tried Main Street first.”

“Many folks were glad to see you?” asked Tom.

“Too many,” sighed Dick.  “That remark doesn’t apply to any old friends, but there are a good many who always turned up their noses at us in the old days.  Now, just because we’re cadets, and because half-baked Army officers are supposed to be somebody in the social world, Greg and I are getting so much social mail that we fear we shall have to hire a secretary for the summer.”

“Nobody will bother us, I guess,” grimaced Tom.  “Most people here probably think that, because we’re engineers, we run locomotives.  That’s what the word ‘engineer’ suggests to ignoramuses.  Now, the man who runs a locomotive should properly be called an engine-tender, or engineman, while it’s the fellow who surveys and bosses the building of a railroad that is the engineer.  You get a smattering of engineering work at West Point, don’t you?”

“We’ve been at math. and drawing, so far,” Dick explained.  “That all leads up to the engineering instruction that we shall have to take up in September.”

“Oh, I dare say you’ll get a very fair smattering of engineering,” assented Tom.  “It’s nothing like the real practice that we get, though, out in the field with the survey and construction parties.  I guess you fellows, after your grind in the High School, found West Point math. pretty easy, didn’t you?”

Dick laughed merrily before he answered.

“Tom, the math. that a fellow gets in High School would take up about three months at West Point.  How are you on math., now?”

“Oh, not so fearfully rotten,” replied Reade complacently.  “Harry and I have had to dig up a lot of new math. since we’ve taken on with an engineering corps in the field.  Harry, trot up some of the kind of mathematics that we have to use.”

“Wait a moment,” put in Dick.  “Greg, sketch out an easy one from the math. problems we have to dig into at West Point.  Give ’em something light from conic sections first.”

Cadet Holmes sketched out, on the back of an envelope, the demonstration of a short problem.

Tom and Harry looked on laughingly, at first.  Then their eyes began to open.

“Do you really have to dig up that sort of stuff at West Point,” demanded Reade.

“Yes,” nodded Dick.  “And now I’ll show you another easy one, belonging to descriptive geometry.”

The two young engineers looked on and listened for a few moments.

“Stop!” commanded Hazelton, at last.  “My head is beginning to buzz!”

“If that’s the sort of gibberish you have to learn, I’m more than ever glad that I didn’t go to West Point,” proclaimed Reade.