And Hike rejoiced, because he hated to have any one hate him. Also, he now realized that he must have made a good run. He had been too busy to think much about it. Timidly, he approached the coach and asked, “Do you think I’ll have a chance to stick on the team, now?” “Well, if you don’t put some _form_ into your running, and quit thinking about chewing gum and aviating when you ought to get into the game, we’ll use you for taking tickets,” growled the coach. As that was all he said, Hike rejoiced, for he knew that he was practically safe for three years of playing! Otherwise the coach would have eaten him at one bite. Lieutenant Jack Adeler was reading, that evening, amid a confusion of diagrams of wireless instruments, and plans of motors, when Mousey Tincom and four other Sophomores knocked. “Please, sir, Lieutenant Adeler,” begged Mousey, “we heard that you’ll give out the list of Soph. corporals to-morrow, and that Griffin may be left out, because you were afraid it would look—not look right—if you appointed—Hike, being a personal friend of yours—Please, sir, we don’t want to butt in, but the whole class, honest, sir—” “Does the whole class really want him?” queried Lieutenant Adeler. “Yes, sir.” “All right. I understand.” Next day when the military appointments were announced, Hike’s name was among the corporals. And the only complaint the school made was that Hike was not first sergeant. CHAPTER XXI LEFT EARED DONGAN Left Eared Dongan, Sophomore, jester of the Fig Tree Celebration and candidate for football-end, was not a Great Man, just then. He was an aeroplane. It may have looked as though he was merely a boy, running over a hilltop, two miles from the academy, waving his arms madly. But that was a mistake. Not only was he really an Updegraff monoplane, but also he was breaking all records. Of course he was alone. He would not, for his chances of becoming end, have allowed any one to see him making b’lieve. He twisted the second button on his coat; which, as every aviator knows, steers an aeroplane (that is, when the aeroplane is a Santa Benicia Sophomore). Then he pulled his nose, which turns down the elevating planes, and puffed up the last stretch of Bilbunet Hill. He saw a bunch of chaparral, and suddenly he was not an aeroplane. Not at all. He was Colonel Church, leading a brilliant night attack on Yaqui Indians. But his trousers got fuzzy, and he became an aeroplane again. He soared through a little pass, toward a deserted shack once occupied by a shepherd, away from all the regular hill-paths. He sat down with his back against the board walls, trying to work out the following terrific problem: If your arms are the wings of an aeroplane, how can you use the hands that are so inconveniently stuck way out there at the end of those arms, to manage levers?