"Didn't you fellows hear what happened last night?" the cadet cried. "The eagles are gone!"
"What? The eagles gone?" a dozen voices cried out.
"Sure, sawed right off at the base. Some of the fellows are out there looking at them now."
Instantly there was a wild rush for the front door of Locke Hall. Interest and excitement ran high. The eagles referred to were two huge ornaments placed on the wide steps leading up to the main hall, and they had been donated to the school by an army officer who had learned his first military tactics at Woodcrest. They were made of hollow brass, stood four and one half feet high, and had looked bravely out across the campus for a number of years, a very real part of the makeup of the cadet school. They had always seemed immovable, and to be told that they had been carted off was a distinct shock to the young soldiers, to whom they were a source of intense pride.
Don, Jim and Terry reached the front steps as soon as any of the others and took in everything at a glance. The parapet of the steps looked strangely bare without the great brass birds, and the cadets hurried to look at the spot where they had stood. Sure enough, they had been sawed off close to the stone, and only an iron stem with some flakes of fillings remained to show where they had been.
"Now, who in the world could have done that?" gasped Hudson, looking about him in a dazed way.
"Whoever did it must have been awfully careful about it," ventured Berry. "It was done in the night and no one heard it, apparently."
"Somebody had better hunt up the colonel," suggested a cadet, and in a few minutes the headmaster was out on the steps, his face grave and thoughtful.
They kept a respectful silence while the colonel looked on the stone rampart and examined the rough stumps of iron upon which the eagles had been mounted. He then looked over the assembled cadets.
"None of you gentlemen heard any sound of sawing during the night, did you?" he questioned.
None of the cadets had heard anything. By this time almost the entire corps had assembled. Barnes reminded the colonel that the previous night had been a very dark one.
"True," nodded the colonel. "It looked like a storm and I remember that there was no moon and no stars. Well, this is a pretty serious business, boys."