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Show Ike Lamp aYMtVi BY ARTHUR STRINGER JL W. K. U. Service THE STORY SO FAR Three women love Sidney Lander, Lander breaks with Trumbull. Salarla engagement ring. Alaska mining engineer. He is engaged Bryson, a big out-door girl, also loves At last the air begins to clear up in to Barbara Trumbull, whose rich father Lander. She disappears. Carol's and Sidney's romance. Is contesting the mining claim of Klon- Lander finds Salarla. She had Injured Lander and Carol decide to fly to dike Coburn, now dead. Because of her leg while hunting. Barbara misin- Chakitana, scene of her father's claim. Carol Coburn, teacher at Matanuska, terprets the rescue and flings away her But they seem unable to charter a plane. INSTALLMENT XVII It was the incompetents, of course, who'd caused the most trouble, the incompetents like the prolific and indolent Betsy Sebeck and her unkempt un-kempt brood of offspring. But even in their sloth they remained instruments instru-ments of destiny. For it was the mountainous Betsy's two-year-old daughter Azalea who tried her best to swallow an open safety pin, while playing about a littered tent floor, the safety pin already alluded to. The pin stuck in the child's throat, and the mother, thinking it was choking to death, ran out screaming for help. It wasn't long before Katie Ka-tie and her Black Maria arrived on the scene. She failed to find the pin and suspected it had slipped down to the child's esophagus. But as she was without either X-ray machine or bronchoscopic instruments, instru-ments, she decided the case was serious and took matters in her own hands. In the absence of her Ruddy she radioed for a plane to carry her patient down to a properly equipped hospital. The answer came, three hours later, when we heard the drone of a motor through the hilltops. The courier of the sky, in this case, proved to be Slim Downey, the Cordova pilot, who had picked up the summons when he stopped to refuel re-fuel at Fairbanks, on his way south from the upper Porcupine. He swung down between a furry colony of mountain clouds and was quickly surrounded by an army of rapt-eyed rapt-eyed watchers. But while the colony children pawed about the knees of that hel-meted hel-meted Viking and fingered and patted pat-ted his plane struts, Katie did an odd and altogether unexpected thing. When she noticed her little patient in greater distress and giving giv-ing every evidence of a choking fit, Katie took the child by the heels, and, holding her upside down in those muscular big hands of hers, abruptly cracked-the-whip with that limp and unprotesting little body. She swung and jerked it as a busy housewife shakes a floor rug to rid it of dust. It seemed like sudden madness. But an equally sudden shout went up from the watchers. For there, in plain view, they saw a safety pin fall out between their feet. "I guess that puts a kink in my mercy flight," observed Slim Downey Dow-ney as Lander pushed through to his side. I saw the two men standing there, talking together. And I saw a quick and affirmative nod of Slim's hel-meted hel-meted head. But it wasn't until Lander shouldered his way through to my side that I realized the import im-port of their hurried conference. "We've got our break," he said with an exultant light in his eye. "Slim's to fly us in to the Chakitana." Chaki-tana." It was while Lander was stowing E-way our duffel, half an hour later, and I was waiting to climb into the cabin, that the culminating touch came to that drama of speed. It came in the person of Salaria, mounted bareback on one of her father's horses. She swung off her horse and came straight to my side. Then she caught at my arm, as though to hold me back from climbing up into the cabin. "Kin I come?" she said. She said it roughly yet almost imploringly. implor-ingly. "What for?" I asked, at a loss for words before such impetuosity. "To swing in, if there's any fight-in'," fight-in'," she announced. "I kin be a two-legged wildcat when there's call for it." I had to tell her, of course, that there'd be no call for it. But I noticed no-ticed that Salaria's dusky eyes continued con-tinued to hold a look of desperation despera-tion "You've got Sid Lander," she said with a shoulder-movement of comprehension com-prehension touched with abnegation. "I'm as dumb as a fool hen in a snowdrift," she dolorously confessed. con-fessed. "I never savvied." y "Savvied what?" I questioned. "I never savvied until that silk-skinned silk-skinned Trumbull cat put me wise," was Salaria's embittered reply. "But I sure gave her an earful when I had the chance. I may not git him. But she won't." CHAPTER XXI The valley, which had once seemed so big to me, became a narrow shadow shad-ow between clustering peaks, peaks as white as wolf teeth, that lost their sharpness as we climbed. "Why do you call this ship the Snowball Baby?" Lander inquired of the singularly silent man at the stick. Slim Downey laughed. "That's what they christened her back at Bear Lake," he answered. "Up at Eskimo Point they used to call her the Igloo Queen." Still again 1 heard Lander's voice. "Why aren't you carrying radio equipment?" Slim laughed for the second time. "I'm a bush pilot. What good is two-way radio to us when we're bcl-y-dragging through a thousand miles wilderness?" "You know the Chakitana, of course?" "Sure," answered Slim. "I was grounded and frozen in there two winters ago. Since then we've kept a gas cache at Carcajou Lake." He scanned the welter of peaks and valleys val-leys over which we were arrowing. "You'll be seeing it in half an hour, if the fog holds off." But the fog didn't hold off. A new uneasiness crept through me as we went higher, to climb into the clear. Our pilot seemed to be watching the valley bottom over which we were winging. He dropped lower as the cloud floor fell away under us. He gave me the impression impres-sion that he was peering about for familiar landmarks. Then I saw him stiffen and cry out, at the same time that Lander leaped to his feet. "What's that?" was the latter's sharp demand. Slim Downey didn't turn as he shouted back. But there was indignation indig-nation in his voice. "It's rifle shots. There's some fool shooting at us." "Turn back," I heard Lander's voice call out. "And go down like a duck?" was Slim's sharp-noted reply. "Not on your life!" Then I saw the helmeted head stoop closer to the instrument board. This was followed by a series of hand . movements that were meaningless mean-ingless to me. But even before I "It's rifle shots. There's some fool shooting at us." heard the stutter of the engine I could read alarm in that forward-bent forward-bent figure. "They got my fuel tank," Slim suddenly shouted over his shoulder. "That's Blackwater Lake on our left there. I think I can make it. I've got to make it." We veered a little as we slid down an invisible stairway that was nothing noth-ing but crystal-clear air whistling through our struts. I could see the earth coming -up to meet us. And I could feel Lander's hand groping for mine as we catapulted over ragged rag-ged cliffs with little patches of snow between them. Then the vaUey widened wid-ened again and between the lightly wooded slopes beneath us I could see a dark-surfaced pool of water I that became much more than a pool as we drew down on it. I heard Slim's throaty shout of gratitude and felt Lander's hand tighten on mine. But we merely sat there, in silence, as we taxied to a stop. "What do we do now?" asked Lander Lan-der with what I recognized as purely pure-ly achieved casualness. Slim took out a cigarette and sat down on a rock. Then he mopped his face. "We've got to get gas," he announced, an-nounced, "from our Carcajou cache. But it's no good to me, of course, until I've plugged that hole in my tank." "Can you do it?" I rather tremulously tremu-lously inquired. Slim laughed at my woebegone look. "It'd surprise you what a bush-hawk bush-hawk can do when he has to. When I was iced down on Cranberry Lake last winter, with a dead battery and no starting crank, I was blacksmith enough to turn an oil-screen wrench into a hand crank. There's always al-ways a way, young lady." Lander placed his consoling big hand on my shoulder and said: "It's all right. We're not licked yet." "I know it," I said with a foolish little surge of faith. "We've grub for two weeks," he pointed out, "whatever happens. We've fuel, all the fuel we need. And a chance for snowshoe rabbit or caribou if we need it. You'll sleep in the plane cabin tonight and Slim and I'll camp on shore here." "And then what?" I asked, trying to keep the desolation out of my voice. "Then, in the morning, when Slim's working on his ship and packing in the gas, you and I will start overland over-land for Big Squaw Creek. We should do it in a day. And every day counts." It was easy enough to say. But out on the trail, ten hours later, I realized there was little romance in mushing over the broken terrain of the Alaskan hinterland. There was no path through the spruce groves and no foothold on the hillside rubble. rub-ble. Twice we worked our way up rough traverses that came to a dead end and compelled us to retrace re-trace our steps. Our shoulder packs trimmed down as they were to essentials, essen-tials, seemed to grow in weight with the growing hours. I even came to resent the tugging burden of Sock-Eye's Sock-Eye's old six-gun swinging from my belt holster. But I could see that my own burden, compared to Lander's, Lan-der's, was trivial. For my trail mate carried a belt ax and rifle and grub bag and blankets. Sometimes he had to use the ax to cut a way through the undergrowth. We were two plodding animals, swallowed up by the wilderness, fighting our way through from one peril to another. And when we slept out that night, with a campfire between us and the aurora borealis brushing the blue-white peaks of the mountains above us, I lay stunned with a slowly widening sense of solitude sol-itude touched with unreality. It was the far-off howl of a wolf that brought a final cry of protest from my lips. "I'm not much good to you, am I?" Lander quietly announced. I detected a new timbre in his voice. And it was both a joy and a peril to me. "You're a good fighter," I told him. "But that isn't everything," he suggested. "No, it isn't everything," I agreed. His gaze went, for a moment, .down the dark valley, and then returned re-turned to my face. "I know what you mean," he said in that overdisturbing low voice of his. "But our fight isn't won yet." "But aren't we letting something better slip through our fingers?" I was foolish enough to cry out. Lander sat considering this. "You call me a good fighter," he finally said." "But any fighting I've done for you is easily explained." "How?" I asked. And again, somewhere between the blue-white peaks, I could hear the far-off wolf howl. "Because I've always loved you," he said with his face a little closer to mine. Then he stooped still lower, and pressed his cheek against my cheek. His face was rough and unshaven. But in its very roughness I found something infinitely soothing. CHAPTER XXn When we broke camp the next morning Sidney Lander seemed surer sur-er of himself. Through his binoculars binocu-lars he examined the wide and twisting twist-ing valley country and announced that we'd have to climb up into higher high-er territory. "I begin to know these hills," he told me. "We're at last getting somewhere." He pointed into the distance. "That's the Chakitana," he called down to me. I detected a note of excitement in his voice. "And in an hour we ought to be spotting the Big Squaw." So we pushed on again. But my trail mate's rise in spirits was not an enduring one. "I don't like this loss of time," he said as he glanced at the sun. "It's three days now. And we may be too late." "Too late for what?" I questioned. "We'll know that when we get there," he said with a curtness which I wrote down to overtensioned nerves. So still again we went forward. We went clambering over mammil-lated mammil-lated rock ridges and dipping down into blue-shadowed canyons. "It's great country," Lander called back over his shoulder. I couldn't agree with him. It seemed wild and torn and empty, the outpost of the world, a scarred battlefield bat-tlefield where titanic forces had clashed and enmities older than man had left desolation in the wake of tumult and warfare. I was glad when Lander came to a stop, at the end of a traverse that led to a wide rock ledge overlooking overlook-ing the westerly running valley. The valley itself widened out, with a cleft or two in the hill ranges where a series of canyons and smaller valleys radiated out from the lower wide bowl, with gravel beds and groves of stunted spruce interspersed inter-spersed along it's broken slopes. "We've made it," I heard Lander say. I stood watching him as he moved forward and mounted a glacial hardhead hard-head that had all the appearance of a pagan throne carved out of granite. He had a little trouble, because be-cause of his heavy pack, in getting to the top of it. Then with his glasses he scanned the valley. I (TO BE CONTINUED) |