later and still famished, the group headed up Fifth Avenue and bumped into one of Koehler's best friends who staked them for a meal. "We paid for the tickets the next day, for we thought we might want to work the same game again." Koehler wrote in a letter shortly after arriving at Annapolis, "Everybody in town, officers, professors, and 'cits', (fellow midshipmen) thinks it most extraordinary that I should go into the Academy ... they say that for a man who has tasted life at Harvard, it is a mighty hard thing to buckle down to the exact routine [and] discipline... in practice here [but] I am going to do my very best here, to make up for my past, and to do something for my future and for the future of the ones I love." What in the eighteen-year old Koehler's past he felt that he had to make up for is unclear. The stories of his arrival at Annapolis vary only in their "outrageousness": that he arrived with a horse and valet; another recounts a horse and cook. While at the academy, he maintained a pied-à-terre with a steward, where hot food was always available to all comers. He was known for his success as a ladies' man, often sending American Beauty roses to the objects of his affection. At Annapolis, Koehler qualified as a rifle expert shot in 1908, the highest level, and was awarded the Navy Sharpshooter's Badge. Somewhat presciently, the page entry for Koehler in the Naval Academy annual Lucky Bag contains two quotes from Shakespeare that were placed by the editors and intended to capture his essence, "The glass of fashion and the mold of form, the observed of all observers", and "I am not in the roll of common men." The yearbook editors' words are equally descriptive, "A capable, conceited man who cannot be bluffed." During the winter before Koehler graduated from Annapolis, his grandfather passed away. Before he died, Henry revealed the purported secret of Hugo's birth. He told Hugo that his father was not Oscar Koehler, but Rudolph, crown prince of Austria. There is no record of how Hugo responded to this shocking disclosure. But for the rest of his life, Koehler searched for some proof of this. He revealed the story to only his closest confidants, and speculated that the truth was locked in the archives of the Vatican,