"Well, we are, aren't we?" demanded Reade.

"You are---what?"

"The last fellows you've met in Gridley. But where's Greg?"

"If he's out of bed," grinned Prescott, "he's in cit. clothes."

"Carrying a rifle and marching the lock-step---the route-step, I mean---has dulled your brain," growled Tom Reade. "Is Greg in Gridley?"

"What scoundrel is taking my name in vein?" demanded Holmes, coming upon the trio.

Then there were hearty greetings, all over again. But in the end Reade looked Greg over from head to foot.

"Do they make you sleep on a stretcher at West Point?" Tom wanted to know. "Or what do they do, to pull a pair of galoots out to the length that you two have attained."

"It's the physical training and the military drills," explained Prescott, laughing. "But my! You fellows look like the Indian's head on a copper cent!"

Tom and Harry were, indeed, highly bronzed by the hot southwestern sun. Harry, in fact, was well on the way to being black, so burned had he become by his last few months of work.

"I hope, if you fellows are ever allowed to go forth into the Army, you'll get your first station down in Arizona," teased Tom.

"I don't," retorted Greg, "if it will make us look like you two."

"Oh, it won't," broke in Harry mockingly. "You see, we have to work down in Arizona. But you fellows wouldn't. We've seen some thing of the soldiery down in that part of the world, and they're the laziest crowd you ever saw. Why, the Army officers in Arizona sleep all day and grumble about the heat all night. They have tame Apaches to do their work for them. Oh, no, you wouldn't suffer down in Arizona!"

"But how do you fellows come to be home at this time?" asked d.i.c.k.

"Homesick!" sighed Tom. "The fellows in our engineer corps are ent.i.tled to some leave. So Harry and I waited until we had enough leave piled up, and then we started back for Gridley."

"Well, it's hot on this corner," muttered Greg, "and there's an ice cream place down the block, where the electric fans are going.

Let's make a raid on the place. Do you fellows remember when we were happy if we could buy a ten-cent plate and then get by ourselves with six spoons to dip into the ice cream? Come on!

Let's get good and square for those days."

"Yes; it is hot here on this corner," a.s.sented d.i.c.k.

"Hot?" demanded Reade impatiently.

"Humph! Harry and I were just regretting that we hadn't worn our top coats today. We came to Gridley to cool off, and this old town seems like a heaven of coolness after the baked-brown alkali deserts of Arizona."

"Double orders for each one of us," explained Harry, after the quartette of one time High School chums had seated themselves under a buzzing fan.

Now, the chums of old days had time to look each other over more closely.

Tom and Harry were taller than in the old High School days, but they had not quite reached the height of d.i.c.k and Greg. Both of the young civil engineers, besides being heavily bronzed, were thin and sinewy looking. Thin as they were, both looked the pictures of health. Though Tom and Harry did not "advertise" their tailors as well as did the two West Point cadets, nevertheless the pair of young civil engineers looked prosperous. They had the general air of being the kind of young men who are destined to succeed splendidly in life.

Before the ice cream---the first double order, that is---reached the table, all of the young men were plunged into stories of their adventures during the last two years. Readers of these two series are familiar with the adventures that the young men discussed.

"You've been getting a heap more excitement out of life, you two,"

Prescott admitted frankly. "Still, from my point of view, I wouldn't swap with you."

"Just as bughouse on West Point and the Army as ever, are you?"

quizzed Hazelton.

"Just as much, and always will be," d.i.c.k nodded, beaming.

"I can't share your enthusiasm," laughed Hazelton. "We've seen the Army in the West, and they're a lazy, little-account lot."

Instead of getting angry, however, d.i.c.k and Greg laughed outright.

"I wish we had you at West Point for forty-eight hours, right in barracks and Academic Building," declared Greg, his eyes dancing.

"Whew! But you'd be able to view real world from a new angle!"

"Oh, maybe at West Point," nodded Hazelton teasingly. "But afterwards, in the Army, it's just one dream of indolence."

"Well, what do the Army officers actually do, out your ways"

challenged Greg.

"Why, they---well, they-----"

"You don't know a blessed thing about it, do you?" dared Greg.

"I thought not. You see, we do know something about what Army officers do with their time. That's what we're learning at West Point."

"Don't let's fight," pleaded Tom pathetically. "Fellows, we may never meet again. Before another year rolls around Hazelton and I may have been scalped and burned by the Apaches, and you fellows may have died at West Point, from nervous prostration brought on by overeating and lack of exercise. So let's be good friends during the little time that we may have together."

"When you get time," put in d.i.c.k dryly, "you might as well tell us when you reached Gridley."

"After ten o'clock last night," supplied Harry. "Of course, we had to go home first. But this morning we set out to find you.

We knew, of course, that any place would be likelier than your homes, so we tried Main Street first."

"Many folks were glad to see you?" asked Tom.

"Too many," sighed d.i.c.k. "That remark doesn't apply to any old friends, but there are a good many who always turned up their noses at us in the old days. Now, just because we're cadets, and because half-baked Army officers are supposed to be somebody in the social world, Greg and I are getting so much social mail that we fear we shall have to hire a secretary for the summer."

"n.o.body will bother _us_, I guess," grimaced Tom. "Most people here probably think that, because we're engineers, we run locomotives.

That's what the word 'engineer' suggests to ignoramuses. Now, the man who runs a locomotive should properly be called an engine-tender, or engineman, while it's the fellow who surveys and bosses the building of a railroad that is the engineer. You get a smattering of engineering work at West Point, don't you?"

"We've been at math. and drawing, so far," d.i.c.k explained. "That all leads up to the engineering instruction that we shall have to take up in September."

"Oh, I dare say you'll get a very fair smattering of engineering,"

a.s.sented Tom. "It's nothing like the real practice that we get, though, out in the field with the survey and construction parties.

I guess you fellows, after your grind in the High School, found West Point math. pretty easy, didn't you?"

d.i.c.k laughed merrily before he answered.

"Tom, the math. that a fellow gets in High School would take up about three months at West Point. How are you on math., now?"

"Oh, not so fearfully rotten," replied Reade complacently. "Harry and I have had to dig up a lot of new math. since we've taken on with an engineering corps in the field. Harry, trot up some of the kind of mathematics that we have to use."

"Wait a moment," put in d.i.c.k. "Greg, sketch out an easy one from the math. problems we have to dig into at West Point. Give 'em something light from conic sections first."