do.  He hailed me.  I acted as though I wanted to get away, then allowed myself to be overhauled.  I was reported, of course, and made to pay the penalty.  But I was able to make the other fellows in the class believe that Prescott had trailed me, on purpose to rub it into me.  That looked like over zeal, backed by a grudge, and the first class swallowed it in fine shape.  They gave him the silence, but had not made it permanent Coventry.  Then he caught another man, named Durville, for going off the post in ‘cit.’ clothes, and that settled the case against that fellow Prescott.  But it was my trick that made all the rest possible.”

“I don’t see that that was anything very clever,” rejoined Henckley.

“I told you, didn’t I,” argued Jordan, “that it was as much luck as cleverness.”

“What part of it was clever, anyway?” jeered Henckley.

“Why, putting the whole game through, and making the class take it up, yet doing it all so that the trick could never be traced back to me,” replied Jordan.

In the shadow, Durville turned briskly, gripping Dick’s hand with his own.

Douglass saw.  After a bare instant’s hesitation the class president also took Prescott’s hand, giving it a mighty squeeze.

In the joy of that friendly grasp from his own classmen, Dick Prescott almost felt that all the bitterness of the last few months had been wiped out in a second.

Then Douglass stepped out from the shadow, his face stern and set.

“Perhaps you will want to stop talking, Mr. Jordan,” he called.  “Your conversation has not been a private one!”

With the strong wind blowing away from Jordan, that cadet heard only a rumble of voices.  Both he and Henckley, however, caught sight of the advancing figures.

“Hello!  What are you fellows doing here?” demanded the money lender, with blustering indignation.

“I might ask that question of you, fellow, but I won’t, for I already know,” replied Cadet Douglass, fixing his eyes on the stranger.

“You’ve been listening to our talk?” demanded Henckley angrily, while Jordan, after his first gasp of dismay, seemed to shrivel back against the wall of Cullum Hall.

“Mr. Jordan,” continued the class president, facing the dismayed one in gray uniform, “I don’t believe the significance of this meeting has escaped you?”

“No-o-o,” wailed Jordan in misery.

“Now, see here, young fellows, don’t you go and blab what you’ve been spying on just now,” remonstrated Mr. Henckley, a note of dismay creeping into his tone.

“It can hardly concern you, sir,” flashed Cadet Douglass, wheeling upon the money shark.  “Yet I suppose it does, too.  For now I do not see how Mr. Jordan can hope to remain at the Military Academy.  That, I suppose, may possibly affect your security for the money which, I take it, Mr. Jordan has borrowed from you.”

“But you won’t blab, and have him kicked out?” coaxed Mr. Henckley, his voice now wholly wheedling.