The Boy Scouts for Uncle Sam

Excerpt

CHAPTER I.

THE EAGLES AT HOME.

"After all, fellows, it's good to be back home again."

The speaker, Rob Blake, leader of the Eagle Patrol of Boy Scouts, spoke with conviction. He was a "rangy," sun-burned lad of about eighteen, clear-eyed, confident and wiry. His Boy Scout training, too, had made him resourceful beyond his years.

"Yes, and it's also good to know that we each have a good substantial sum of money in the bank as the result of the finding of the Dangerfield fortune," agreed Merritt Crawford, his second in command, a sunny-faced, good-natured looking youth a little younger than Rob and crowned with a tousled mass of wavy brown hair.

"Well, at any rate we've had plenty to eat since we've been back," chimed in Tubby Hopkins, a corpulent youth who owed his nickname to his fleshiness.

"That's right, Tubby," laughed Paul Perkins, another bright-eyed young "Eagle"; "that's something we didn't always get in the Adirondacks. I thought at one time that you'd fade away to a shadow."

"Humph! Pretty substantial sort of shadow," grinned Hiram Nelson, who, besides Paul Perkins, was the inventive genius of the Eagles.

The scene of these reminiscences was the comfortably furnished patrol room of the Eagles, situated over the bank of the little town of Hampton on the south shore of Long Island. Rob Blake's father, the president of the bank, was a patron of the Eagles, and had donated the room to the boys some time before.

Boxing gloves, foils, baseball bats and other athletic apparatus dear to a boy's heart lay scattered about the room in orderly confusion. On the walls were diagrams of the "wig-wag code" and the "Morse code simplified," with other illustrations of Scout activities.

But it was above the door that there was perched the particular pride of the Eagles' hearts—a huge American eagle, a bird fast disappearing from its native haunts. With outstretched wings and defiant attitude it stood there, typifying the spirit of its young namesakes. The eagle had been a present to the lads from Lieutenant Duvall, of the United States Army, whom they had materially aided some time before in various aerial intrigues and adventures. What these were was related in full in the "The Boy Scouts and the Army Airship."

In the first volume of this series, "The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol," it was told how the boys came to organize, and how they succeeded in unravelling a kidnapping mystery, involving one of their number. In the second volume, "The Boy Scouts on the Range," we followed the boys' adventures in the far southwest. Here they encountered Moqui Indians and renegade cow-punchers. But through all their hardships and adventures they conducted themselves according to the Scout laws.

The third volume was "The Boy Scouts and the Army Airship," referred to in connection with Lieutenant Duvall. In this book a military biplane played an important part, as did the theft of a series of plans of a gyroscope invention of Lieutenant Duvall's, who was an all-around mechanical genius....