The Girl Aviators Sky Cruise | Page 2

through those glasses----"
Peggy stuffed the binoculars into her brother's brown hands.
"Here, look for yourself," she ordered. Her voice was so imperious that
Roy obeyed immediately.
An instant later his sister's expression of dumfounded amazement was
mirrored on his own straightforward, good-looking countenance.
"Well, as Bud used to say out West, 'if that ain't the beatingest'!" he
gasped.
"What did you read?" demanded Peggy breathlessly. "Repeat it so that I
may be sure my eyes didn't play me a trick."

"Not likely, Sis; the letters are big enough. They show up on that red
painted barn of a place like a big freckle on a pretty girl's chin."
Then he repeated slowly, mimicking a boy reciting a lesson:
"The Mortlake Aeroplane Company. Well, wouldn't that jar you?"
"Roy!" reproved Peggy.
"There's no other way to express it, Sis," protested the boy. "Why,
that's the concern that's been advertising so much recently. Just to think,
it was right at our door, and we never knew it."
"And that hateful old Mr. Harding is interested in it, too, oh!"
The exclamation and its intonation expressed Peggy's dislike of the
gentleman mentioned.
"It's a scheme oh his part to make trouble for us, I'll bet on it," burst out
Roy. "But this time I guess it's no phantom airship, but the real thing.
What time is that naval lieutenant coming to look over the Prescott
aeroplane, Peggy?"
"Some time to-day. He mentioned no particular hour."
"Do you think it possible that he is also going to take in that outfit
down the road?"
"It wouldn't surprise me. Maybe that's why they are just putting up the
sign. They evidently have refrained from doing so till now in order to
keep the nature of their business secret. If we hadn't come back from
Nevada sooner than we expected, we might not have known anything
about it till the navy had investigated and--approved."
Far down the road, beyond the big red building, came a whirl of dust.
From it presently emerged a big maroon car. Peggy scrutinized it
through the glasses.
"Mr. Harding is in that auto," she said, rather quietly for Peggy, as the

car came to a stop in front of the Mortlake Aeroplane Manufacturing
Company's plant.
Shortly before Peggy and Roy Prescott, their aunt, Miss Sallie Prescott,
with whom they made their home, and their chums, Jess and Jimsy
Bancroft, had returned from the Nevada alkali wastes, the red building
which engaged their attention that morning had caused a good deal of
speculation in the humdrum Long Island village of Sandy Beach. In the
first place, coincident with the completion of the building, a new
element had been introduced into the little community by the arrival of
several keen-eyed, close-mouthed men, who boarded at the local hotel
and were understood to be employees at the new building. But what the
nature of their employment was to be, even the keenest of the village
"cross examiners" had failed to elicit.
Before long, within the freshly painted wooden walls, still sticky with
pigment, there could be heard, all day, and sometimes far into the night,
the buzz and whir of machinery and other more mystic sounds. The
village was on tenter-hooks of curiosity, but there being no side
windows to peer through, and a watchman of ferocious aspect stationed
at the door, their inquisitiveness was, perforce, unsatisfied. Not even a
sign appeared on the building to indicate the nature of the industry
carried on within, and its employees continued to observe the stoniest
of silences. They herded together, ignoring all attempts to draw them
into conversation. What Peggy and Roy had observed that day had been
the first outward sign of the inward business.
From the throbbing automobile, which the boy and girl had observed
draw up in front of the Mortlake plant, a man of advanced age alighted,
whose yellow skin was stretched tightly, like a drumhead, over his
bony face. From the new building, at the same time, there emerged a
short, stout personage, garbed in overalls. But the fine quality of his
linen, and a diamond pin, which nestled in the silken folds of his
capacious necktie, showed as clearly as did his self-assertive manner,
that the newcomer was by no means an ordinary workman.
His face was pouchy and heavy, although the whole appearance of the
man was by no means ill-looking. His cheeks and chin were clean

shaven, the close-cut beard showing bluely under the coarse skin. For
the rest, his hair was black and thick, slightly streaked with gray, and
heavy eyebrows as dark in hue as his hair, overhung a pair of shrewd,
gray eyes like small pent-houses. The man was Eugene Mortlake, the
brains of the Mortlake Company. The individual who had just
descended from the automobile, throwing