“I helped,” said he, “and with hearty good-will--I can tell you.” It was as if his hand had forgotten that it had grown fifty years older; as the fingers closed convulsively one could see that it was in spirit once again pummeling Long K. “But as people must belong once and forever to their own kind,” he continued his narrative, “so this Long K had to be naturally a revengeful, spiteful malicious _canaille_. He would much rather have gone to the captain and resentfully told him everything, but in our presence he did not dare; for that he was too cowardly. “But that he had received a thrashing before the whole class, and that Little L was to blame for it, for that he did not forgive Little L. “One afternoon, then, as recreation hour came round again, the cadets went walking in the courts; the two brothers, as usual, by themselves; Long K linked arm in arm with two others. “To get from the Karreehof to the other court where the trees were, one had to pass under one of the wings of the main building, and it was a rule that the cadets must not pass through arm in arm, so as not to obstruct the passageway. “On this particular afternoon, as ill-luck would have it, Long K, as he was about to pass through with his two chums from the Karreehof to the other court, met the two brothers at the corridor, and they, deep in their thoughts, had forgotten to let go of one another. “Long K, although the affair was no concern of his, when he saw this stood still, opened his eyes wide and his mouth still wider, and called out to the two: ‘What does this mean,’ said he, ‘that you go through here arm in arm? Do you intend to block the way for honest people, you set of thieves?’” Here the colonel interrupted himself. “That is now fifty years ago,” said he, “and more--but I remember it as if it had happened yesterday. “I was just going with two others from the Karreehof, and suddenly we heard a scream come from the corridor--I can not describe at all how it sounded--when a tiger or other wild beast breaks loose from his cage and throws himself on some one, then, I think, one would hear something like it. “It was so horrible that we three let our arms drop and stood there quite paralyzed. And not only we, but everything in the Karreehof stopped and suddenly grew quiet. And then everything that had two legs to run with kept rushing up at full speed toward the corridor, so that it fairly swarmed and thickened black around the corridor. I, naturally, with the rest--and what I saw there-- “Little L had climbed on to Long K like a wildcat--nothing else--and with his left hand hanging on by the latter’s collar so that the tall gawk was half-choked, with his right fist he kept up a crack--crack--and crack right in the middle of Long K’s face, wherever it happened to strike, so that the blood was pouring from Long K’s nose like a waterfall.