“Ground-school dinners! What! That means you’re hungry!... Dreadfully hungry?”

“Oh, not so bad as all that; only rather tired of feasting on air-puffs,” came the laughing answer. “Joy-sticks and air-puffs! My companion had some of the former in his pocket--meaning chocolate bars!”

“Joy--fiddlesticks! We’ll get you something more substantial right away. Supper--supper will be ready in a winged hurry!”

Wing-footed, indeed, one-half the army of girls started for a united drive upon the bungalow and its seashore resources.

“Oh, not so many! ‘Too many cooks,’ you know!” The Guardian’s voice arrested them. “Four will be plenty--those who are housekeepers for to-day, with Olive and Sara. Well! you’re on your mettle, girls; it’s something to entertain aviators unawares.”

“Lucky loopers of the clouds, who certainly have tumbled into a bed of roses!” chuckled the youthful pilot, throwing off his leather “togs,” examining his a?rial ship all over by the light of an electric torch, whose luminous ring belted his own adventurous figure in its greenish-brown trick-suit fashioned like the farming overalls which his girl-hostesses had worn that day in their battle with weeds and pests upon Squawk Hill.

“Well! aren’t you glad now, ‘Goggle Eyes,’ now that we’ve landed in clover--hit it lucky--that I decided to nose her down and make a landing here--bunk out on our wings to-night?”

Thus he challenged the observer, with his dangling binoculars.

“Well! I do admit it’s ‘low tide’ inside me, Ned; every little creek bare as a sand-pocket; I shan’t object to being filled up,” acknowledged the older air-man. “Only I feel rather”--he smiled through the flash-light’s luminous ring upon the picturesque maidens in ceremonial dress--“rather as if we had been sailing by the star-chart and landed upon some more romantic planet than old Mother Earth, which hits some of us such hard knocks at times. I--I’ll have to rub my eyes to make sure I’m awake--not having an air-dream,” blinkingly.

“Oh-h, what a pretty compliment to the Council Fire!” Sybil purred happily. “Now! won’t you--can’t you--tell us something about the a?roplane--the big, strong battle-plane--about its different parts, and what it is made of?”

“Humph! Let the pilot explain his own ship. Go ahead, ‘Tailspin Ned’!” laughed the observer, challenging the younger aviator, Lieutenant Edwin Mortimer Fenn, R. M. A.

“Well! Well, as you see, ours is the tractor type of a?roplane, having the propeller in front, drawing it through the air,” explained the latter, flashing his electric light upon that mahogany propeller which shone like a silver paddle--if not a silver piece--in a gasping fish’s mouth.

“These are the a?rofoils--wings--which support it in flight, having a spread of thirty-six feet from tip to tip, on each plane. And----”

“You have--oh! excuse my interrupting!--you have some wings on your breast, too.” Little Owl pointed shyly to those four-inch mirror-wings, the army insignia, reflecting the young air-man’s flying achievements, gleaming against their velvet setting upon his rough gabardine overalls.

“Yes! I wouldn’t swap them for a General’s stars.” His white teeth flashed boyishly. “They represent my commission as an R. M. A.--Reserve Military Aviator. When I was a humble cadet my breast-wings were stiffer,” laughingly.

“How--how do you mean?” came from a dozen enthralled girls.

“Why! they were of metal--silver--three inches across; not limply wrought upon black velvet; that was when I was in training on the flying-fields, where I went, from Aviation Ground School, where--where the dinners--were--so good,” na?vely.

“Mercy! I’m just dying to fly,” came breathlessly from one fluttering feminine throat--Little Owl’s. “According to my symbolic name, I’m a bird, anyway!”

“Well, don’t die--flying. Probably after the war is over--no doubt before very many years have flown ahead of you--your Camp Fire Group will have a Bird Corps of its own,” encouragingly.

“And win honor-beads for parading in the air--sky-blue and cloud-barred, I suppose!” burst ecstatically from one or two of the other girls whose symbolic names were also derived from the feathered tribe, with which, in a dazzling skyscape vision, they saw themselves competing.

“Now, perhaps, you’d like to know a little more about the wings that will support you.” The R. M. A., otherwise Tailspin Ned--a nickname he had acquired upon the training-fields--flashed his torch again over the a?roplane--the mammoth gaping red fish. “Well, the wing-ribs--spars--are of light wood, covered with fine linen, doped with a preparation to make it durable; so is the fuselage, body of the machine. The props connecting the............