At last came the rush of visitors for the closing week in camp, the return of the pallid-faced furlough-men, the surrender of their offices to the _bona fide_ sergeants, and Geordie and Connell found themselves shoulder to shoulder in the front rank on the right of Company B. Three days later, and with the September sunshine pouring in their window on the south side of barracks, the two corporals were room-mates at last. Connell being already hailed among his class-mates as "Badger," in honor of his State, the next thing Geordie knew some fellow suggested that there was no use calling him "corporal" when he really was a corporal and would be a sergeant in less than a year, and so, Connell being "Badger," why not find a characteristic name for Pops. "Call him _Ki_ote," suggested Fowler, who came from far Nebraska, and gave the frontiersman's pronunciation to the Spanish _coyote_—the prairie wolf. And so it happened that the two Western chums started their house-keeping for the Third Class year under the firm name of "Badger & Coyote."
Meantime Benny Frazier, staggering under a heavy weight of demerit and the ill-concealed distrust of a number of his class, had moved into the room across the hall. Connell and Geordie had hoped they would not find themselves in the same division, but the matter seemed unavoidable. Benny's chum was a college-bred young fellow of some twenty years of age, with a love for slang, cigarettes, and fast society. His name was Cullen. No steadiness could be expected there. Extremes met in the two cadet households at the south end of the third division "cock-loft" that beautiful autumn, and, except as extremes, they hardly met at all. There was little intercourse between the rooms. Cullen sometimes came into borrow matches, soap, postage-stamps, or something or other of that ilk; Benny never.
Studies began at once as they did the previous year, and Geordie started about the middle of the fourth section in mathematics and in the fifth in French. In determining his general standing this year he would have no English study to aid him. He must do his best with analytical and calculus, with French and drawing, and for drawing he had little or no taste. It was with gloomy foreboding, therefore, that the boy began his work, for there was every prospect of his standing lower in January than at the beginning of the term. Frankly he wrote home his fears, and his eyes filled when he read the loving, confident replies. Both father and mother were well content with his record, and bade him borrow no trouble. Even if French and drawing should pull him down a few files, what mattered it?