midnight
`` Somebody said you had been locked up for robbing a jewelry shop . '' `` There has been a robbery and we were suspected . But we were not locked up . '' As soon as he was able to do so , Captain Putnam learned the names of the twelve cadets who had been on picket duty between midnight and six o'clock that morning . These cadets were marched to one of the classrooms and interviewed one at a time in the captain 's private office . From the first six cadets to go in but little was learned . One cadet , when told that something of a very serious nature had occurred -- something which was not a mere school lark and could not be overlooked -- confessed that he had allowed two cadets to slip out of camp and come back again with two capfuls of apples taken from a neighboring orchard .