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The Boy Aviators on Secret Service; Or, Working with Wireless
The Boy Aviators on Secret Service / Working with Wireless
CHAPTER I
AN IMPORTANT COMMISSION
“Come in!”
The gray-haired man who uttered these words gazed sharply up at the door of the private office of the Secretary of the Navy’s Bureau, at Washington, D. C., as he spoke. He was evidently anticipating callers of more than usual importance judging from his expectant look. The old negro who had knocked opened the door and respectfully stood waiting.
“Well, Pinckney?”
“Dey have come, sah.”
“Ah; good, – show them in at once.”
The old negro bowed respectfully and withdrew. A few seconds later he reappeared and ushered in two bright looking youths of sixteen and fourteen with the announcement in a pompous tone of voice:
“Messrs. Frank and Harry Chester.”
Frank, the elder of the two brothers, was a well set up youngster with crisp, wavy brown hair and steady gray eyes. Harry, his junior by two years, had the same cool eyes but with a merrier expression in them. He, like Frank, was a well-knit, broad-shouldered youth. Both boys were tanned to an almost mahogany tinge for they had only returned a few days before from Nicaragua, where they had passed through a series of strange adventures and perils in their air-ship, the Golden Eagle, perhaps, before her destruction in an electric storm, the best known craft of her kind in the world and one which they had built themselves from top plane to landing wheels.
The Secretary of the Navy, for such was the office held by the gray-haired man, looked at the two youths in front of him with some perplexity for a moment.
“You are the Boy Aviators we have all heard so much of?” he inquired at length with a note of frank incredulity in his voice.