tower to-morrow morning immediately after roll-call, and we want to know if you are in."
"No; I'm not in. I'm out. That's me."
"There, Rodney," exclaimed one of the students. "I hope you are satisfied now that you wasted time when you went after Dick Graham. He's a Yankee."
"You're another," retorted Dick.
"Do you still claim to be neutral?"
"I do, for a fact. You see, Missouri – "
"Oh, Dick, have a little mercy on a fellow, and don't say that again," cried half a dozen voices at once.
"Well, then, what do you want me to say? I'll not help you pull down the flag, if that is what you are after. I say, let her alone and she will come down of herself when the sunset gun is fired."
"We don't want her to come down of herself," answered Rodney. "We want the satisfaction of hauling her down."
"Very well, go and do it; but don't come to me whining over the broken heads you will be sure to get before you are through with the business. If you will let the orderly run her down, I will help steal her, so that she can't be run up in the morning; but being neutral, Missouri not having gone out of – "
"That scheme won't work at all," Rodney declared, with some disgust in his tones. "Don't you know that the colonel takes charge of the bunting every night?"
"I believe I have heard something to that effect."
"And don't you know that he keeps it locked in his bureau?" chimed in
Billings.
"Having been on duty at headquarters a time or two I am not ignorant of the fact," answered Dick. "All I ask of you is to do as I say, and I'll get the flag."
Of course the boys were impatient to know what they could do to help, and Dick at once proceeded to unfold his plans; but as they will be revealed presently we do not stop to tell what they were. Some of the combative ones among the students did not like the scheme at all, for there was not enough danger and excitement in it; and if it succeeded, they would be deprived of the pleasure of listening to the praises which they were sure the Barrington people would lavish upon them, when it should become known that they had hauled the flag down after a desperate battle with the Northern sympathizers who had tried to protect it. But these were in the minority. The others had no desire to provoke a fight with Marcy Gray and his friends, and it was finally decided that Dick's plan was the safest and best.
"That rather interferes with your arrangements, Cole," said Ed Billings, as the boys paired off and bent their steps toward the academy, Rodney Gray leading, with the flag in his hand. "Those girls were particular to say that the next time you came to see them you must bring word that the flag had been hauled down. I don't know whether or not they will be quite satisfied when you tell them that it was taken from the colonel's room, after it had been pulled down in the proper way."
Cole wasn't certain on that point, either; but he had said all he could against the adoption of Dick Graham's plan, and that was all anybody could do.
CHAPTER IV
"Now, fellows," said Rodney, as soon as the line had been formed, "who knows a song appropriate to the occasion? We want to let the folks in advance of us know that we are coming, so as to see what they will do and say when they behold the banner of our young Republic."
"Hear, hear!" shouted the boys. "Strike up something, somebody." Every one looked at Dick Graham, who was the finest singer in the squad, and the latter, after a moment's reflection, cleared his throat and sang as follows:
"We are many in one while there glitters a star
In the blue of the heavens above,
And tyrants shall quail 'mid their dungeons afar,
When they gaze on the motto of love.
By the bayonet traced at the midnight of war,
On the fields where our glory was won —
Oh, perish the hand or the heart that would mar
Our motto of 'Many in One.'"
A more disgusted lot of boys had never been seen in Barrington than Rodney and his friends were when Dick finished singing the above, which was a part of two verses of "E Pluribus Unum." Of course the members of the squad all knew the song, but they did not suppose that Dick would have the audacity to mix it up in this way. If they had suspected how the song was going to end, they would have drowned him out in short order.
"That's about the biggest sell that was ever perpetrated on a party of confiding students," said Ed Billings, as soon as the whoops and yells of derision with which the patriotic words were greeted had died away. "Can't some good Southerner sing something that will hit the spot?"
Nobody could; for if any of the Confederate songs, which afterward became so popular on both sides the line, were in existence, they had not yet reached Barrington; so the only thing left for the boys to do was to keep step to "hay-foot, straw-foot, boom, boom, boom!" which they chanted with all the power of their lungs. Dick Graham congratulated himself on having said a word for the Union, and paid no sort of attention to the good-natured prods in the ribs which he received from the boys who were marching beside him. He stoutly affirmed that he had uttered nothing but his honest sentiments, and hoped that every one who took a hand in marring "our motto of many in one" would get whipped for his pains.
The students were well acquainted with the people living along their line of march, and were more than satisfied with the enthusiastic greetings given to them and their flag. When they filed through the gate into the academy grounds the sentry presented arms, and the commandant, who was standing at his window, turned away. The boys saw it, and told one another that the colonel was coming to his senses, and that he would not interpose his authority when they were ready to run up the Stars and Bars on the following morning.
"You fellows are making a heap of fuss about nothing," said Marcy Gray, as his cousin halted beside the camp-chair in which he was sitting and waved the flag over his head, while the rest of the squad trooped up the wide steps that led into the hall. "Take that thing away. The time may come when you will be sorry you ever saw it."
"It shall gleam o'er the sea 'mid the bolts of the storm,
O'er the battle and tempest and wreck,
And flame where our guns with their thunder grow warm – "
sang Rodney. "Look here, old fellow: Couldn't you get up spirit enough to give us a cheer?"
"I don't think I could," replied Marcy. "Did you fellows all have passes? I thought not. If things were as they used to be you would find yourselves in the guard-house in less than ten minutes."
"We are aware of it," answered Rodney; "but if things were as they used to be, we should not have climbed the fence and gone to town without permission. But these are times when rules don't count. There is your mail, and if you will take a friend's advice, you will read that paper carefully. I think there is something in it that concerns you."
"What is it, and where is it? Tell me all about it, and then I shall be spared the trouble of looking it up."
"Well," said Rodney, as if he hardly knew how to give his cousin the desired information, "Congress has passed a law commanding all Northern sympathizers to leave the limits of the Confederacy within ten days."
"Has this State gone out?"
"Not
