ING DECLARES HIMSELF.

Readers of the first volume of this series, "The Girl Aviators and The
Phantom Airship," will recall Mr. Harding. They will also be likely to
recollect his son, Fanning, who made so much trouble for Peggy Prescott
and her brother, culminating in a daring attempt to "bluff" them out of
entering a competition for a big aerial prize by constructing a phantom
aeroplane. Fanning's part in the mystery of the stolen jewels of Mrs.
Bancroft, the mother of Jess and Jimsy, will likewise be probably held in
memory by those who perused that volume. The elder Harding's part in the
attempt to coerce the young Prescotts into parting with their aerial
secrets, consisted in trying to foreclose a mortgage he held on the
Prescott home, with the alternative of Roy turning over to him the blue
prints and descriptions of his devices left the lad by his dead father.
How the elder Harding was routed and how the Girl Aviator, Peggy Prescott,
came into her own, was all told in this volume. Since that time Mr.
Harding's revengeful nature had brooded over what he chose to fancy were
his wrongs. What the fruit of his moody and mean meditations was to be,
the Mortlake plant, which he had financed, was, in part, the answer.

In the volume referred to, it was also related how Peter Bell, an old
hermit, had been discovered by means of the Prescott aeroplane, and
restored to his brother, a wealthy mining magnate.

In the second volume of the Girl Aviators, we saw what came of the meeting
between James Bell, the westerner, and the young flying folk. By the
agency of the aeroplane, a mine--otherwise inaccessible--had been opened
up by Mr. Bell in a remote part of the desert hills of Nevada. The
aeroplane and Peggy Prescott played an important part in their adventures
and perils. Notably so, when in a neck-to-neck dash with an express
train, the aeroplane won out in a race to file the location papers of the
mine at Monument Rocks. The rescue of a desert wanderer from a terrible
death on the alkali, and the routing of a gang of rascally outlaws were
also set forth in full in that book, which was called "The Girl Aviators
on Golden Wings."

The present story commences soon after the return of the party from the
Far West, when they were much surprised--as has been said--to observe the
mushroom-like rise of the Mortlake factory. But of what the new plant was
to mean to them, and how intimately they were to be brought in contact
with