Maybe you'll be captain next year, Darry."

"I don't want to be," Dave answered, with a shake of his head. "If you
couldn't carry our team to victory I don't dare try."

"Then I'll be captain--if I'm asked," promised Dan, with the grin that
always lurked close to the surface of his face. While hundreds of
midshipmen felt desperately blue on the homeward journey, Dalzell had
already nearly forgotten his disappointment.

"You'll never be asked," predicted Hepson good-humoredly. "Danny boy, the
trouble with you would be that the fellows would never know when you were
in earnest. As captain of the eleven, you might start to give an order,
and then nothing but a pun would come forth. You're too full of mischief
to win victories."

"I hope that won't be true if I ever have the luck to command a
battleship in war time," sighed Dalzell, becoming serious for four or
five seconds. Then he bent forward and dropped a cold nickel inside of
Joyce's collar. The cold coin coursed down Joyce's spine? causing that
tired and discouraged midshipman to jump up with a yell.

"Why does the com. ever allow that five-year-old imp to travel with men?"
grunted Joyce disgustedly, as he sat down again and now realized that
the nickel was under him next to the skin.

"Danny boy," groaned Dave, "will you ever grow up? Why do you go on
making a pest of yourself?"

"Why, the fellows need some cheering up, don't they?" Dan inquired.

"If you don't look out, Danny boy, you'll rouse them to such a pitch of
cheerfulness that they'll raise one of the car windows and drop you
outside for sheer joy."

The joy that had been manifest in Annapolis that morning was utterly
stilled when the brigade reached the home town once more. True, the band
played as a matter of duty, but as the midshipmen marched down Maryland
Avenue in brigade formation they passed many a heap of faggots and many a
tar-barrel that had been placed there by the boys of the town to kindle
into bonfires with which to welcome the returning victors. But to-night
the faggot-piles and the tar-barrels lay unlighted. In the dark this
material for bonfires that never were lighted looked like so many
spectral reminders of their recent defeat.

It hurt! It always hurts--either the cadets or the midshipmen--to lose
the Army-Navy game.

Once back at quarters in Bancroft Hall, it seemed to many of the
midshipmen as though it would have been a relief to have to go to study
tables to work. Yet,