“We didn’t set the cannon crackers off; we didn’t see anyone around the monument, and we don’t know anything about it.”

“All true,” nodded Dick.  “But we’ll have to say it in all the different styles of good English that we can think of.”

Dick and Greg reached the encampment, and passed inside the limits, just before they heard the guard marching back.

Then all was ominously quiet over at the tent of the O.C., Captain Bates.

Tattoo had gone some time ago.  Now the alarm clock told the bunkies that they had just three minutes in which to get undressed and be in bed before taps sounded on the drum.

“It’s a shame, too,” muttered Dick in an undertone.  “We won’t be any more than on the blanket before the summons from the O.C. will arrive.”

“Here it comes, now,” whispered Greg, nudging his bunkie.

But it was Anstey, their tentmate, hastening to be undressed in time against taps.

“What was the row?” asked the Virginian.

“Cannon crackers over at Battle Monument,” replied Dick.  “We were over there at the time.”

“You were?” asked Anstey quietly, but shooting at them a look of amused suspicion.

So many cadets were now seeking their tents that our three bunkies did not notice that one footstep ceased before their door, for a moment, then passed on.

The man outside was Bert Dodge, also of the Dodge was a former Gridley High School boy and a bitter enemy of Dick’s.  The origin of that enmity was thoroughly told in the High School Boys Series.

During the plebe year Dodge, who was a fellow of little honor or principle had done his best to involve Prescott in serious trouble with the Military Academy authorities, but had failed.  Dodge, however, had succeeded in escaping detection, and had succeeded in passing on from the plebe to the yearling class.

Anstey, however, who had been Dodge’s roommate in the plebe year, was firmly resolved that he would not be roommate to Dodge when they returned to cadet barracks the next year.

Dodge hated all three of the bunkies in this tent, but Dick Prescott he hated more than the other two combined.

“Yes; we were near the spot,” Dick said, answering Anstey’s question.  “But we didn’t set off the crackers, or have anything to do with the matter.  We don’t even know, or have a guess, as to who the offenders were.”

Though Dodge knew, in his soul, that he could believe Prescott, it was with an evil smile that Bert now hastened on, gaining his own tent.

Taps sounded, and fifteen minutes more went by.  It began to look as though the Battle Monument affair would be allowed to go by until morning.  Greg was asleep, and Dick was just dozing off, when there came a sharp step in the company street.  The step had an official sound to it.  That step halted, suddenly, before the door of the tent of our three bunkies.