“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.
“We are, sir,” rejoined Frank, with just the ghost of a smile playing about his lips at the great man’s evident astonishment—and its equally evident cause.
“I beg your pardon,” hastily spoke up the Secretary of the Navy, who had observed Frank’s amusement; “but you seem——”
“I know what you were thinking, sir,” interrupted Frank, “that we are very young to undertake such exacting service as Admiral Kimball outlined to us in Nicaragua.”