Their backs ached from the long-continued drilling in what was yet, to them, the rigor of near-military carriage.

Both chums toiled up the stairs to their bare room.
"Oh, you brute!" muttered Greg, standing in the middle of the room and shaking his fist in the direction of the area.
"Meaning--whom ?" queried Prescott, with a wan smile.
"Whom could I mean but Brayton ?" almost hissed young Holmes.
"Why does that fellow hate us all so ?" "I'll tell you a secret, if you want to hear it," proposed Dick mysteriously.
"Please!" begged Candidate Holmes.
"Then I don't believe he does hate us." "What ?" gasped Greg incredulously.
"I don't believe he'd remember half our faces if he passed the members of his squad in the area right now," declared Dick.
"Then why does he persecute us so ?" demanded Greg indignantly.
"I don't believe it is persecution," Dick continued.
"Then why, in the name of all that's kindly, does that fellow put us under the heel of hateful usage?
Why must we submit to the tyranny of that cadet corporal ?" "It's the West Point way--that's all, I guess." "Do you propose to submit to it ?" challenged Greg.
"Yes," retorted Dick soberly.

"I don't want to have to leave the Academy and go home stamped a failure." "Neither do I," admitted Candidate Holmes in a more moderate tone.

"But I wonder whether we have to stand so much nonsense from a petty young official like a mere corporal ?" "I'm afraid we do," nodded Dick.

"Now, see here, Greg, can't you make a good guess as to why we're put through such a grilling ?" "I'll confess I can't see any human reason in it," declared Candidate Holmes.
"Why, what did we come here to learn to be ?" "Soldiers." "Are we soldiers yet!" "Of course not," Greg admitted.
"Do you think these people at West Point have time to coax and pamper us along!" "Probably not.