For an hour or two after the meeting was over the elated middlers made a good deal of noise with their yells and their cheering, to which no one objected except those who happened to want to study at this ill-chosen hour. Later a few leading spirits cast about for some more striking mode of proving their importance than the threadbare and laborious fashion of cheers. The class flag which the seniors, following a precedent, had displayed on the Academy tower very early on Washington’s birthday, had been seasonably and ignominiously removed by the conscientious boy who rang the Academy bell. The middlers concluded that the cleverest thing for them would be to hang their own class flag aloft on the day when the school was to break up for the spring recess,—the following Wednesday.

Boys are proverbially unskilled in keeping secrets. By Monday night the seniors knew of the middlers’ plan. By Tuesday night the middlers knew of the seniors’ plan, which was, of course, to anticipate their friends on Wednesday morning, and have the senior, not the middler banner, wave a farewell to the scattering school. The middlers then advanced the execution of their scheme several hours. Early Tuesday night instead of Wednesday morning, a daring middler, Tompkins by name, scaled the Academy roof, mounted the belfry, and fixed to the weather-vane the banner of his class. Then sliding down the lightning-rod again to the main roof of the building, he settled himself there for his hour’s vigil.

Report of this forward movement of the enemy was brought to Sands’s room early in the evening. He hastily summoned advisers; Melvin, Varrell, Curtis, Dickinson, Waters, Todd, and others whose names are not known to this story, gathered to his call.

Waters proposed to storm the watch immediately, change flags, and set a new guard. Melvin and Varrell objected vigorously to the plan as dangerous and foolhardy, and apparently were supported by the others. Dickinson then suggested that the wisest course would be to leave to the middlers their flag, their night-watch, and their victory.

“And have them gloat over us forever afterward?” said Sands. “Not on your life!”

“We should never hear the last of it,” said Todd, wondering how a fellow could be cold-blooded enough to suggest such a course,—but Dickinson always had been queer.

Marks and Reynolds now joined the company, and heard a report of proceedings.

“I agree with Dickinson,” said Melvin, renewing the discussion. “These class rows are dangerous things to start, for you can’t tell what the end will be. If we take down the middlers’ flag and put ours up, the middlers will set their hearts on getting back at us, and then the thing will seesaw back and forth until there’s serious trouble. We had a good example of that last year when Martin and his gang stopped the car.”

“If we let them get ahead of us in this, they’ll be encouraged to try something else,” remarked Curtis. “Hit ’em when you can, I say, only be sure you don’t miss. It’s worse to try and fail than not to try at all.”

“And on the other hand,” put in Varrell, quietly, “if you let them entirely alone and pay no attention at all to their doings, they will find no special credit in the thing. The easiest way to beat them is to let them alone.”

“What a sandless lot!” exclaimed Marks, in disgust. “Why don’t you come out square and say you’re afraid to do it?”

“Shut up, Marks,” ordered Sands, “or you’ll get into trouble.”

“A valiant man like Marks might do it alone,” said Melvin, stretching himself as he rose to his feet. “I shouldn’t think of interfering with his opportunity. Well, good night all; I’m going home to bed.”

Varrell and Dickinson joined him at the door. Curtis started to follow, but a significant wink from Sands detained him. “Good night,” he called after them, “I guess I won’t go just yet.”

Tompkins sat on the Academy roof, in coat and gloves, waiting and musing and shivering. The night was clear and moonless. The day had been warm; it was freezing again now. At eleven he heard below the welcome call of Benson, the relieving watch, and scuttled down to the ground as fast as his cold hands and stiff legs would allow. At twelve o’clock Bosworth took his turn. He got up with some difficulty, as he was little used to climbing, and pulled up after him by a string a voluminous ulster borrowed of a larger classmate, in which he rolled himself snugly, as he crouched at the base of the belfry where the lightning-rod reached up its side to the weather-vane above.

For a quarter of an hour complete silence reigned. Then the lone watcher became conscious of vague noises underneath, now at the side, now in front. With heart beating in quick heavy thumps, he freed himself from the ulster and crept around the belfry to the ridgepole that ran toward the front of the building, and along this to the peak of the gable. Projecting his head carefully over, he heard voices,—at first indistinct, then somewhat clearer.

Whatever the unknown persons were doing, they were very deliberate in their movements. Minutes had passed before he made out figures on the roof of the porch below. They waited here, and spent more time in muffled conversation, apparently discussing the method of scaling the wall above, which, as Bosworth said to himself reassuringly again and again as he clung shivering to the cold slates, was unscalable. At last the frost penetrated to his bones, making it obviously dangerous to lie longer in his cramped position. He was just about to grope his way back to his warm coat, when the figures on the porch began to be active again. He heard distinctly—it sounded like Curtis’s voice—“I say we can’t do it. We may as well go home as freeze here.”

A few minutes later the speakers seemed to be on the ground again. Presently their voices were lost in the sound of feet treading carefully the board walk that led to the street. Soon these sounds, too, had died away, and absolute stillness reigned again.

Numb with cold Bosworth crept back to his nook, and wrapped himself once more in the great coat, which he found in a heap by the foot of the lightning-rod. He was puzzled at this, for he had a distinct impression of crawling out of the coat, as a worm out of a cocoon, and leaving it spread on the roof behind him.

“It’s a vile job, anyway,” he groaned, “and I was a fool to let them drag me into it. I shall freeze to death here.”

But the hour was nearly over. He was just falling into a risky doze, when Dearborn’s call came up from below, and presently Dearborn himself startled him by appearing suddenly at the edge of the roof.

“All right up here?” asked the newcomer.

“I suppose so,” grumbled Bosworth, “if you can call it all right to have your legs and arms frozen off.”

“Seen anything or heard anything?”

Bosworth hesitated. The instructions of the leaders had been definite, “Signal at the first suspicious sound!” When the voices aroused him, his first impulse had been to give the preconcerted signal; but fear of being made the centre of a scuffle on the roof, or of being compelled to hold the fort at the foot of the lightning-rod until classmates gathered to the rescue, had kept his lips sealed.

“Well, what’s the matter with you?” snapped Dearborn. “Didn’t you hear what I said? You act as if you were asleep.”

“No, not a sound.”

“It seems to take a long time to get it out.”

Bosworth roused himself. “When you’ve been freezing as long as I have, you won’t be so anxious to talk yourself.”

“Give me the coat then,” replied Dearborn, grabbing it without more ado. “You can have it in the morning. Now clear out and go to bed. This is the hour when they come, if they come at all.”

So the watch changed hourly through the still, cold night. The last man aloft descended at six, just as the sun was peeping above the horizon. The cooks were already hard at work in the big kitchen of Carter Hall. Soon the boys who cared for the yard would be at their early tasks, and with the dormitories gradually waking it was no longer advisable to maintain the sentinel on the roof. Halfway between the Academy and Carter, the retiring guard met his two successors, who were to continue the watch between six and seven from the concealment of the gymnasium porch. Together the three looked proudly up at the bunch of white that hung limp between the east and north arms of the Academy weather-vane.

“There she is all right,” said Strout. “With the first puff of wind she’ll blow out and show herself.”

At seven the watch was over—the last watch. Not a senior had appeared. The middlers breakfasted early, then hung round the steps of Carter, waiting for the chapel bell.

“It’s coming!” cried Dearborn, holding up his finger in joyful anticipation. “And at the right time, too! See the tree-tops bend!”

Just as the dismal clang of the bell sounded out its first summons, when the boys, slowly sauntering forth from dormitory entries, were lazily reckoning up the minutes of liberty left to them before the final fatal stroke should cut off their entrance into chapel, the breeze struck the weather-vane, filled out the folds of the flag, and set it flapping vigorously.

“Three long ‘Seatons’ for the middle class!” shouted Strout, leaping out from the waiting group with cap in hand. “Make it good now, one, two, three—”

A groan from behind stopped him suddenly. The breeze had strengthened; the white flag was exposed in its full length and breadth; and it bore the numerals not of the middle, but of the senior class!

“Some mistake about that flag, isn’t there, Strout?” rang out Curtis’s voice from the steps. “You must have got a blind man to put that up.”

Strout returned neither look nor word, but he collared every sentinel before the first recitation and cross-examined him thoroughly. Every one, including Bosworth, swore that he had watched honestly and intently at the lightning-rod beside the belfry during his whole hour, and had heard nothing. Every one, except Bosworth, told the truth.