On the following Wednesday after the big game a startling thing happened. A group of the cadets were talking around the door of the classroom when a cadet from Clinton Hall joined them. It was early in the day and none of the boys from Locke had been outside yet.
“What’s the excitement, Apgar?” asked Jim noting the flushed face of the cadet.
“Didn’t you fellows hear what happened last night?” the cadet cried. “The eagles are gone!”
“What? The eagles gone?” a dozen voices cried out.
“Sure, sawed right off at the base. Some of the fellows are out there looking at them now.”
Instantly there was a wild rush for the front door of Locke Hall. Interest and excitement ran high. The eagles referred to were two huge ornaments placed on the wide steps leading up to the main hall, and they had been donated to the school by an army officer who had learned his first military tactics at Woodcrest. They were made of hollow brass, stood four and one half feet high, and had looked bravely out across the campus for a number of years, a very real part of the makeup of the cadet school. They had always seemed immovable, and to be told that they had been carted off was a distinct shock to the young soldiers, to whom they were a source of intense pride.
Don, Jim and Terry reached the front steps as soon as any of the others and took in everything at a glance. The parapet of the steps looked strangely bare without the great brass birds, and the cadets hurried to look at the spot where they had stood. Sure enough, they had been sawed off close to the stone, and only an iron stem with some flakes of fillings remained to show where they had been.
“Now, who in the world could have done that?” gasped Hudson, looking about him in a dazed way.
“Whoever did it must have been awfully careful about it,” ventured Berry. “It was done in the night and no one heard it, apparently.”
“Somebody had better hunt up the colonel,” suggested a cadet, and in a few minutes the headmaster was out on the steps, his face grave and thoughtful.