Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net
THE GIRL AVIATORS
AND
THE PHANTOM AIRSHIP
BY
MARGARET BURNHAM
M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
CHICAGO--NEW YORK
Made in U.S.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Girl Aviators and the Phantom Airship
CHAPTER I.
THE GOLDEN BUTTERFLY.
"Roy! Roy! where are you?"
Peggy Prescott came flying down the red-brick path, a rustling newspaper
clutched in her hand.
"Here I am, sis,--what's up?"
The door of a long, low shed at the farther end of the old-fashioned
garden opened as a clattering sound of hammering abruptly ceased. Roy
Prescott, a wavy-haired, blue-eyed lad of seventeen, or thereabouts,
stood in the portal. He looked very business-like in his khaki trousers,
blue shirt and rolled up sleeves. In his hand was a shiny hammer.
Peggy, quite regardless of a big, black smudge on her brother's face,
threw her arms around his neck in one of her "bear hugs," while Roy,
boy-like, wriggled in her clasp as best he could.
"Now, just look here," cried Peggy, quite out of breath with her own
vehemence. She flourished the paper under his nose and, imitating the
traditional voice of a town crier, announced:
"Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! Roy Prescott or any of the ambitious
aviators--now is your chance! Great news from the front! Third and last
call!"
"You've got auctioneering, the Supreme Court and war times, mixed up a
bit, haven't you?" asked Roy with masculine condescension, but gazing
fondly at his vivacious sister nevertheless.
Peggy made a little face and then thrust forth the paper for his
examination.
"Read that, you unenthusiastic person," she demanded, "and then tell me
if you don't think that Miss Margaret Prescott has good reason to feel
somewhat more enthusiastic than comports with her usual dignity and
well-known icy reserve--ahem!"
"Good gracious, sis!" exclaimed the boy, as he scanned the news-sheet,
"why this is just what we were wishing for, isn't it? It's our chance if
we can only grasp it and make good."
"We can! We will!" exclaimed Peggy, striking an attitude and holding one
hand above her glossy head. "Read it out, Roy, so that Monsieur Bleriot
can hear it."
M. Bleriot, a French bull-dog, who had dignifiedly followed Peggy's mad
career down the path, gazed up appreciatively, as Roy read out:
"Big Chance for Sky Boys!
"Ironmaster Higgins of Acatonick Offers Ten Thousand Dollars
In Prizes for Flights and Planes."
"Ten thousand dollars, just think!" cried Peggy, clasping her hands one
minute and the next stooping to caress M. Bleriot. "Oh, Roy! Do you think
we could?"
"Could what? you indefinite person?" parried Roy, although his eyes were
dancing and he knew well enough what his vivacious sister was driving at.
"Could win that ten thousand dollars, of course, you goose."
Roy laughed.
"It's not all offered in a lump sum," he rejoined. "Listen; there is a
first prize of five thousand dollars for the boy under eighteen who makes
the longest sustained flight in a plane of his own construction--with the
exception of the engine, that is; and here's another of two thousand five
hundred dollars to the glider making the best and longest sustained
flight, and another of one thousand five hundred to the boy flying the
most carefully constructed machine and the one bearing the most ingenious
devices for perfecting the art of flying and--and--oh listen, Peggy!"
"I am--oh, I am!" breathed Peggy with half assumed breathlessness.
"There's a prize offered for girls!"
"No!"
"Yes. Now don't say any more that girls are downtrodden and neglected by
the bright minds of the day. Here it is, all in black and white, a prize
of a whole thousand to the young lady who makes a successful flight.
There, what do you think of that?"
"That Mr. Higgins is a mean old thing," pouted Peggy, "five thousand
dollars to the successful boy and only one thousand to the successful
girl. It's discrimination, that's what it is. Don't you read every day in
the papers about girls and women making almost as good flights as the
men? Didn't a--a Mademoiselle somebody-or-other make a flight round the
bell tower at Bruges the other day, and hasn't Col. Roosevelt's daughter
been up in one, and isn't there a regular school for women fliers at
Washington, and--and----?"
"Didn't the suffragettes promise to drop 'Votes for Women' placards from
the air upon the devoted heads of the British Parliament, you up to date
young person?" finished Roy, teasingly.
Peggy made a dash for him but the boy dodged into the shed, closely
followed by his sister.
But as she crossed the threshold Peggy's wild swoop became a decorous
stroll, so to speak. She paused, all out of breath, beneath a spreading
expanse of yellow balloon silk, braced and strengthened with brightly
gleaming wires and stays,--one wing of the big monoplane upon which her
brother had spent all his spare time for the past year. The flying thing
was almost completed now. It stood in its shed, with its scarab-like
wings outspread like a newly alighted yellow butterfly, which, by a
stroke of ill luck, had found itself installed in a gloomy cage instead
of the bright, open spaces of its native element.
In one corner of the shed was a large crate surrounded by some smaller
ones. The large one had been partially opened and Peggy gave a little
squeal of delight as her eyes fell on it.
"Oh, Roy, that's it?"
"That's it," rejoined the boy proudly, lifting a bit of sacking from the
contents of the opened crate, "isn't it a beauty?"
The lifted covering had exposed a gleam of bright, scarlet enamel, and
the glint of polished brass. To Roy the contents of that crate was the
splendid new motor for his aeroplane. But to Peggy, just then, it was
something far different. A bit of a mist dimmed her shining eyes for an
instant. Her voice grew very sober.
"Three thousand dollars--oh, Roy, it scares me!"
Roy crossed the shed and threw an arm about his sister's neck.
"Don't be frightened, sis," he breathed in an assuring tone, "it's going
to be all right. Why, can't you see that the very first thing that
happens is a chance to win $5,000?"
"I know that. But that contest is not to come off for more than a month
and--and supposing someone should have a better machine than you?"
For an instant that air of absolute assurance, which truth to tell, had
made Roy some enemies, and which was his greatest fault, left him. His
face clouded and he looked troubled. But it was as momentary as the
cloud-shadow that passes over a summer wheat field.
"It'll be all right, sis," he rejoined, confidently, "and if it isn't, I
can always sell out to Simon Harding. You know he said that his offer
held good at any time."
"I know that, Roy," rejoined Peggy, seriously, "but we could never do
that. We could neither of us go against father's wishes like that.
He--well, Roy, it's not to be thought of. Poor dad----"
Her bright eyes filled with tears as her mind travelled back to a scene
of a year before when Mr. Prescott had ceased from troubling with the
affairs of this world, and commended his children to the care of their
maiden aunt--his sister with whom, since their mother's death some years
before, the little family had made their home.
Poor Mr. Prescott had been that hopelessly impracticable creature--an
inventor. Fortunately for himself, however, he had a small fortune of his
own so that he had been enabled to carry on his dreaming and planning
without embarrassing his family. Roy and Peggy had both been sent to good
boarding schools, and had known, in fact, very little of home life after
their mother's death which had occurred several years before, as already
said.
Mr. Prescott, in his dreamy, abstract way, had cared dearly for his
children. But those other children of his--the offsprings of his
brain--that surrounded him in his workshop, had, somehow, seemed always
to mean more to him. And so the young Prescotts had grown up without the
benefit of home influences.
On Peggy's naturally sweet, vivacious character, this had not made so
much difference. But Roy had developed, in spite of his real sterling
worth and ability, into a headstrong, rather self-opinionated lad. His
success at school in athletics and the studies which he cared about
"mugging" at had not tended to decrease these qualities.
It had come as a shock to both of them a year before when two telegrams
had been despatched--one to Peggy's school up the Hudson, and the other
to Roy up in Connecticut, telling them to return to the Long Island
village of Sandy Bay at once. Their father--that half-shadowy being--was
very ill.
The messages had not exaggerated the seriousness of the situation. Three
days after his children reached his side Mr. Prescott gently breathed his
last, dying, as he had lived, so quietly, that the end had come before
they realized it. But in those last brief moments Roy came to know his
father better than ever before. He learned that the dream of his parent
had been to produce an aeroplane free from the defects of its
forerunners,--a safe vehicle for passengers or freight. How far he had
progressed in this there was no time for him to tell before the end came.
But Roy, interested already in aeronautics at school, where he had been
president of "The High Fliers"--a model aeroplane association,--eagerly
took up his father's desire that he would try to carry on his work, and
began to take lessons in flying.
In the shed which had been Mr. Prescott's workshop the framework of an
aeroplane already stood. And with the aid of what money his father had
left him, Roy had carried on the work till now it was almost completed.
But the three thousand dollars which had gone for the motor had
completely exhausted the lad's legacy. As Peggy put it, all their eggs
were in an "aerial basket."
But how much Peggy had aided him, in what had, in the last few months
possessed all his thoughts, Roy did not guess. To what extent her
encouragement had spurred him on to surmount seemingly unconquerable
difficulties, and how she had actually aided him in constructing the
machine, his ambition never realized. Not innately selfish, Roy was yet
too used to having his own way to attribute his success to any one but
himself.
Sometimes, brave, loyal little Peggy, try as she might, could not
disguise this from herself, and it pained her a good deal. But she had
uncomplainingly, ungrudgingly, aided her brother, without hoping for, or
expecting, the appreciation she sometimes felt she was really entitled
to. But her great love for her brother kept Peggy from ever betraying to
him or any one else an iota of her inner feelings.
So intent had the brother and sister been on their talk that neither of
them had noticed, while they conversed, that a big four-door touring car,
aglitter with gleaming maroon paint, and with a long, low hood concealing
a powerful engine, had glided up to the white gate in the picket fence
surrounding Miss Prescott's old fashioned cottage.
From it a frank, pleasant-faced lad and an unusually striking girl, tall,
slender and with a glossy mass of black hair coiled attractively on her
shapely head, had alighted.
Hearing the sound of voices from the open door of the shed in which The
Golden Butterfly, as Peggy had christened it, was nearing completion,
they, without ceremony, at once made their way toward it. Peggy, glancing
up from her sad reverie at the sound of footsteps, gave a glad little cry
as she beheld the visitors standing framed in the sunlight of the open
door. While she and the tall, dark-haired girl mingled their contrasting
tresses in an exuberant school-girl caress, the lad and Roy Prescott,
were, boy fashion, slapping one another on the back and shaking hands
with just as much enthusiasm.
"Why, if this isn't simply delightful, Jess, you dear old thing," cried
the delighted Peggy, as, with both hands on her chum's shoulders, she
held Jess Bancroft off at arm's length, the better to scrutinize her
handsome face, "and Jimsy, too," as she turned to the lad with a bright
smile of welcome; "wherever did you two come from?"
"From the clouds?" demanded Roy.
"No, hardly, although I don't wonder at your asking such a question,"
laughed Jess, merrily, exchanging greetings with Roy. "Roy Prescott,
positively I can see your wings sprouting."
They all laughed heartily at this, while Jess ran on to explain that she
and her brother were stopping for the summer at Seaview Towers, a summer
estate which their father, a Wall Street power, had leased for the
season. Of course, explained the merry girl, who had been Peggy's closest
chum at school, her first thought had been to take a spin over in her new
motor car and look up her friends, for Roy and James--or Jimsy--Bancroft
had been almost as close chums as the girls.
"And so this is the wonderful Golden Butterfly that you wrote to me
about?" exclaimed Jess enthusiastically after the first buzz of
conversation subsided.
"Yes, this is it," said Roy with great satisfaction in his tones, "and
I'm proud of it, I can tell you. I think I've made a success of it."
Jess and Jimsy exchanged glances. And then Jess stole a look at Peggy,
but no cloud had crossed the face of Roy's sister.
"Oh, you darling," thought Jess, "you're too sweet for anything. I just
know how much you contributed to the Golden Butterfly's existence, and
yet you won't detract a bit from Roy's self satisfaction."
As for Jimsy Bancroft, he said nothing. He glanced rather oddly at Roy
for an instant. Then his eyes turned to Peggy's face. Perhaps they dwelt
there for rather a long period of time. At any rate, they were still
fixed on her brave beauty when a sudden shadow fell across the stream of
sunlight that poured into the open portal of the workshop.
"Ah! So this is the place in which young genius finds its habitation;"
grated out a rather harsh, unpleasant voice.
They all looked up. Perhaps none of them--Jimsy least of all--was pleased
at the interruption. The newcomer was a tall, angular man, with a
withered, clean-shaven face,--what Peggy called a "money making face";
and surely that described Simon Harding, as he stood there in his black,
none-too-new garments, and his square-toed shoes. One could fairly catch
the avaricious glint in his eyes as he squinted rapidly over the new
aeroplane's outlines.
By his side stood a youth who was, so far as dress went at any rate, the
exact opposite of the elder man. Fanning Harding--or Fan as he was
usually called--was dressed in elaborate motoring costume. His goggles,
of the latest and most exaggerated design, were shoved up off his
countenance now, exposing to view a good-looking browned face. It was
marred, however, by the same restless, strained look that could be seen
on his father's visage.
"We're not intruding, I hope," he hastened to say, coming forward with a
cordiality that seemed somewhat forced.
"Not in the least," said Peggy, hastily, realizing that none of them had
perhaps looked very cordial, "won't you come in?"
Fan Harding, bestowing an admiring glance on her, seemed to be about to
accept. His father, however, struck in:
"I'll leave you with the young folks, my boy, while I go up to the house.
I have some business with Miss Prescott."
As he shuffled off, Peggy and Roy exchanged somewhat uneasy glances. What
business could this old man--in some respects a power financially and
otherwise in Sandy Beach--have with their aunt?
"Say Peggy," spoke up Fan Harding, suddenly, "ain't you going to
introduce me to your friends? And how about inviting us all to have some
of those strawberries Pop and I noticed as we came down the path?"
"Well, he isn't a bit backward about coming forward!" thought Jess as the
young people, with due formality, went through the ceremony of
introductions.