CHAPTER VII.
A SUDDEN GRIND AT MATH.
Had Dick's been the first door opened six cadets would have been instantly in serious trouble.
Fortunately the door across the corridor was the first to be opened, and the six on this side of the hallway heard another cadet's voice call quietly: "Attention!" It was, therefore, a tactical officer making an inspection.
At the United States Military Academy the superintendent, who has the local rank of colonel, is at the head of this government institution in all its departments.
Discipline, however, and training in tactics, comes within the especial province of another officer, known as the commandant of cadets, who ranks locally as a lieutenant-colonel, and who gets in closer touch with the cadet corps.
Under the commandant of cadets are several other Army officers, captains and lieutenants, who take upon themselves the numerous duties of which the commandant has oversight.

These subordinate officers in the tactical department are known as tactical officers.
The cadets call them "tac.s." Each day one of these "tac.s" is in charge at the office of the commandant, which is in cadet headquarter's building, on the south side of the area of cadet barracks.
This officer, who is in charge for a full period of twenty-four hours, when his turn comes, is officially designated as the "officer in charge." Among the cadets he is privately referred to as the "O.C." In a similar way, in cadet parlance, the commandant himself is known as the "K.C." Now, one of the numerous duties of the O.C., who is an Army officer and himself a graduate of West Point, is to make sudden, unexpected tours of inspection whenever the fancy--or the suspicion--seizes him.
Such an inspection need by no means extend through the whole of cadet barracks.

It may, for that matter, be only to one subdivision, or even to a single floor or room of one subdivision.

Yet record must be kept of such inspections, and of any offenses against discipline that may be discovered by such a flying visit.
A scrap of paper on the floor, a match end on a study table, any article of furniture or clothing out of its proper place, or any undress or untidiness on the part of a cadet, constitutes a breach of discipline, and must be reported and atoned for.

Naturally, a case of hazing would be a most serious "delinquency," as breaches of discipline are termed.
Just what Captain Vesey, O.C., on this day, expected to discover through the present flying inspection will never be known.