His face was pouchy and heavy, although the whole appearance of the man was by no means ill-looking.  His cheeks and chin were clean shaven, the close-cut beard showing bluely under the coarse skin.  For the rest, his hair was black and thick, slightly streaked with gray, and heavy eyebrows as dark in hue as his hair, overhung a pair of shrewd, gray eyes like small pent-houses.  The man was Eugene Mortlake, the brains of the Mortlake Company.  The individual who had just descended from the automobile, throwing a word to the chauffeur over his shoulder, was a person we have met before—­Mr. Harding, the banker and local magnate of Sandy Beach, whose money it was that had financed the new aeroplane concern.

CHAPTER II.

Mr. Harding 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.”