“Cadet Merrill, I have reason to know that when you failed to appear at roll call, from having lost your cap, that it was taken from your room to bring about just such trouble for you. I have reason to know that ink stains were placed upon your uniform to get you into trouble, and that the night when you were reported absent from your room without leave, the one who answered the officer of the guard was not you, but used your name. The bottle found in your room, also the cigars, were put there by those who meant to get you into trouble. Against such acts, which are explained away, you stand perfect in your lessons, in drill and all duties devolving upon you. Hence I cancel these demerits with the warning to your secret enemies that, were they known, dismissal should at once follow the discovery, and if like underhand acts against you, or others, are perpetrated the guilty ones shall be hunted down and the severest penalty shall be visited upon them. Return to the ranks, Cadet Merrill, with your record clear.” There are no more manly youths in the world, taken as a whole, than our baby tars of Annapolis and boy soldiers of West Point, and none more ready to do justice to one of their number wronged, and so it was that the cadet midshipmen felt assured that the commandant was doing only justice to Mark Merrill and letting his persecutors down lightly. So they gave three rousing cheers for Mark’s “clear record,” and a groan for his secret foes. If there were several in the corps who joined in the cheers and groans it was to hide their own confusion worse confounded. CHAPTER XXVI. THE TELLTALE COIN. Barney Breslin was not a popular youth in the Naval School. His nature was somewhat morose; it seemed to go against him to salute his superiors, and he had never won golden opinions for his studious habits and strict attention to duty. He had but one intimate in the corps of cadets, and that one was Scott Clemmons, his roommate. Many wondered how it was that Scott Clemmons had gotten in with Barney Breslin, for, where the one was an aristocrat, the other had just escaped being born in the Emerald Isle, for his parents had set foot upon the “land of the brave and the free” only a week when Barney made his _début_ in life. The father of the youth had played his cards so well in the metropolis that he had gotten to be a man of wealth and a politician of influence, and it had been the dream of the mother’s life to see her boy an admiral before she died.