OCR Text |
Show lie Lamp VaHeyi BY ARTHUR STRINGER JL W. N. U. Service 9 THE STORY SO FAR n(J Sidney Lander, mlninf engineer, li which Trumbull Is contesting. Lander Eric stops her. A shot ring engaged to Barbara Trumbull, but ap- quits his employ, becomes field man- Sock-Eye Schlupp. an . hand parently loves Carol Cobum. MaUnuska ager tor the government's Matanuska friend of the Coburns. P school teacher. Salarla Bryson. a big Valley project. ""era Eric' fvanlshes Salarla out-door girl, also love. him. Carol'. Eric, the Red. makes an taflamma- dered arrested but vanishes, father died with an unproven claim tory speech. Carol also speaks up and also has gone. INSTALLMENT XVI you've indulged your penchant for nocturnal romance." I made no response to that oblique thrust. But Lander's movement as he stepped between us seemed almost al-most a sheltering one. "That's about enough," be said in a voice as hard as nails. "I'll say it is," cried the lady to whom life must have brought very few frustrations. And it was all so futile and foolish that I felt vaguely vague-ly sorry for her. For with a shaking right hand she drew a ring from her finger and with a little gasp of anger flung it at Lander. She flung it badly. It went past the tight-lipped man and landed in the road dust a dozen paces away. But Lander disregarded it. He merely mere-ly stood there, rather gray of face, studying the woman in the driver's seat who so abruptly threw in her clutch and roared off down the long-shadowed long-shadowed roadway. I picked up the ring and held it out to Lander. "You'd better keep this," I said. "It'll all straighten out in time." But Lander didn't seem to hear me. His eyes remained on the vanishing van-ishing car, even when I forced the ring into his hand. Then he looked at me, like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened. "Do you believe that rot?" he challenged. I tried, quite without success, to laugh the tragedy out of his face. "I veyors and have his plat reading confirmed." "Then what are we to do?" I asked. "I want you there as owner," was his answer, "when that official survey sur-vey is made." "But how?" I asked, trying to speak calmly. "We'll go by plane," he explained, "as soon as I can get one in here to pick us up." I found something consoling in my thoughts during the tumult of packing pack-ing and maWng ready and saying an abrupt good-by to my schoolchildren, schoolchil-dren, who faced their midsummer vacation a few days earlier than they had expected. I hurried on to explain to Katie. But Katie, when I found her in Doctor Doc-tor Ruddock's new surgery surrounded sur-rounded by crates and boxes, didn't seem greatly interested. "Why the sudden grandeur?" I asked that tight-lipped lady as I watched her hanging curtains in the wide-windowed living room that still smelled of fresh paint. "Then you haven't heard?" queried que-ried Katie. "It's that boss of mine, getting the nest ready for the new ladybird." "You don't," I demanded, "mean the nurse from Seattle?" "Of course I mean the nurse from Seattle," was Katie's even-toned reply. re-ply. "She's sent up her silver and linen. And the lady herself lands at Seward on Friday." Katie adjusted ad-justed a curtain pin and stepped down from her chair. "They're to be married on Saturday at Anchorage. Anchor-age. And Ruddy wants everything shipshape when they swing back to Palmer on Sunday." Katie endured my stare without flinching. I studied the line of Katie's brawny shoulders, dark against the window light. She smiled a little, at my gasp of protest, but deep in those Celtic eyes of hers I could see the light of tragedy. CHAPTER XX It's odd how destiny can hinge on small and unforeseen things. In this case it was nothing bigger than a safety pin that proved the god from the machine. For our flight in to the Chakitana wasn't as prompt as Lander had expected. ex-pected. "I can't get a plane in today," he explained. "Every ship within flying fly-ing distance seems either chartered or spoken for. And in that I detect Trumbull's fine Italian hnnrl " Salaria didn't come back that night. By the following noon, her father became alarmed. He even appeared at the Administration Building and asked for help. And it seemed the most natural thing in the world that Lander and his lean-nosed lean-nosed Sandy should be among those who hurriedly made ready and trailed out into the surrounding hills in search of her. Why Lander headed head-ed out past the Happy Day I don't know. But I do happen to know that when Barbara Trumbull intercepted inter-cepted him on the outer trail and offered to join him in what she termed his gesture of gallantry, he promptly and firmly declined her companionship. This, apparently, piqued the lady from the superintendent's superin-tendent's lodge, for she later visited visit-ed Katie's tent office and made inquiries in-quiries as to the character and appearance ap-pearance of the missing Artemis. And it obviously didn't add to her questioner's happiness when Katie informed her visitor that Salaria Bryson was the most superb specimen spec-imen of vital and lawless womanhood woman-hood she'd ever clapped eyes on. It was unfortunate, I suppose, that Lander should have been the searcher search-er who eventually found Salaria. He succeeded in locating her, late the second evening, half way up the slope of Big Indian Mountain, in an impromptu camp behind a windbreak. wind-break. For she was woodsman enough to take care of herself in the open. When Sandy nosed her out, in fact, she was quietly broiling bear steaks over a campfire. But she had been unable, apparently, to resume her homeward journey because of a hurt ankle, incurred when she had a hand-to-hand encounter with a wounded black bear. There may have been some question as to the extent of her injury, but the bear carcass was there to substantiate her story of the encounter. They had to rest and make camp on the way, which took up a night and a day. The ankle, I gathered, grew worse, and for some of the distance Salaria surrendered her independence in-dependence of spirit to the extent of permitting her rescuer to carry her. At other times, by clinging to his shoulder, she was able to hobble along at Lander's side. And I could imagine how the forlornly primitive heart of that dusky Artemis went pit-a-pat against her ribs when she felt those sustaining arms about her. But the final portion of that safari wasn't as harmonious as it might have been. For it happened to be John Trumbull's car that picked Salaria Sa-laria up, just beyond the Happy Day, and carried her to her father's door. Lander, for quite discernible reasons, rea-sons, declined to ride in that car with his charge. And Trumbull's openly expressed view of the adventure ad-venture in no way added to Sam Bryson's peace of mind. "The first thing," I suggested, "is to have Doctor Ruddock look at that ankle of yours." Salaria, however, promptly declined de-clined the services of Doctor Ruddock. Rud-dock. She agreed, in the end, to let me bring Katie, and her first-aid kit to the shack. And it wasn't long before that expeditious nurse had the ailing member looked over and strapped up. "Will she be all right?" I asked as Katie's Black Maria went lurching lurch-ing back to Palmer. Katie's Celtic gray eyes met mine. "It's not her ankle that needed strapping up," announced the Red Cross nurse. "It's that many-hungry heart of hers that needs attention." atten-tion." Katie smiled at my small and meditative, "Oh!" "Isn't it a bad sprain?" I inquired. "There's something there all right," conceded Katie. "But I've seen girls dance half a night on a foot worse than that." This gave me something to think about. "You mean," I suggested, "that Salaria wasn't as helpless as she pretended?" Katie's laugh was slightly enigmatic. enig-matic. "Such things," she observed, "have been known to happen.' She probably saw him coming and thumped herself with a stone." When I stopped at the post office for my mail I saw Lander's truck there. A moment later Lander him-telf him-telf came out, with an open letter in his hand. He looked harried and haggard. Just then the Trumbull car iwerved in and shuddered to a stop close beside the truck of battleship-gray. battleship-gray. Alone in the driver's seat was Barbara Trumbull, with her face pale and her eyes flashing fire. "I've just seen the heroine of your mountain adventure," she said. "She seems less ashamed of the situation than you do. She was, in fact, barbarously bar-barously frank about it all" Lander stiffened. "Then there's nothing much for me to say." That brought a vibrata of passion and hurt 'pride into Barbara Trumbull's Trum-bull's voice when she spoke. "I suppose not," she cried. "Especially "Es-pecially as it isn't the first time His eyes remained on the vanishing car. went through much the same thing, without any apparent peril," I reminded re-minded him. "I've always rather banked on your honesty." "Then you trust me?" he asked in a disturbingly lowered voice. I tried to keep my heartbeats steady under the questioning gaze that rested on my face. The barriers, I felt, were finally down between us. It was only my woman's pride, I suppose, that made me fight back the impulse to comfort him in his unhappiness. "Of course," I answered. "Then you'll have to keep on at it," he grimly asserted. "Why?" I asked with a creeping sense of disappointment. That sense of disappointment sharpened as he reached for the letter let-ter which he had thrust into his coat pocket. "Because I've just had word Trumbull's putting through his cancellation can-cellation of your Chakitana claim. He's to head through to the mines there as soon as a plane can pick him up." It failed to stir me as it should have. There was a cloud on my heart, I remembered, more important impor-tant than mine claims. But men, I also remembered, too often preferred pre-ferred facing a hard fight to uttering utter-ing soft words. "It's not easy to understand," he patiently explained. "But your father's fa-ther's patent was granted and recorded. re-corded. There's no dispute about that But the Territory has a large area of unsurveyed land, land remote re-mote from any center of population. popula-tion. The Chakitana falls under that heading. So the field notes of a survey sur-vey for any claim there, where the survey is not tied to a corner of the public survey, has to be tied to a location or what they call a mineral min-eral monument, something showing definite adjacence to some recognizable recog-nizable landmark, such as a creek or a river or a mountain. Is that clear?" "I think so," I dubiously responded. respond-ed. "In the case of the Chakitana claim," he proceeded, "the anchoring anchor-ing landmark is the Big Squaw Creek. But the Trumbull plat shows the Big Squaw to be where he wants it, and not where your father first found it. And Trumbull's intention is to fly in with the Registrar of Mines and a couple of official sur- So, having no choice in the matter, mat-ter, I waited. The Project was like a prospector's pan: what seemed like foolish agitation was really a sorting out of the true metal, with the weaklings and the rubbish slowly washed out over the rim of the North. Week by week, the real workers were taking root and making their half-finished homes a little more livable, liv-able, or building fences and sheds, or clearing and draining and seeding seed-ing more land and discovering it to be incredibly rich land, land that could grow thirty-pound cabbage-heads cabbage-heads and Climax oats that would run sixty-five bushels to the acre. The twenty-hour summer day breathed warmth into that black bowl, touching the dead silt into life, steaming, abundant, explosive life! It brought growth that one could almost al-most see with the nked eye, hay that could hide a team of horses a tropical prodigality of growth, rank and arrogant, gargantuan vegetables, vegeta-bles, grain as high as a man's head too rank with straw, peas and vetch that smothered themselves in their own luxuriance, sweet-peas that could over-run a cabin and smother it in bloom before frost cut the mad growth short, berry-brambles that became a forest, muskeg-surfaces that turned into a choked tangle of grass and alder and cranberry tilled gardens where potatoes grew as big as footballs, where carrots were like war-clubs, where one strawberry could fill a teacup The tillers of that soil may have wondered where their ultimate markets mar-kets were to be. But they tapped its richness and were stunned by its rewards. And much of the glory I also knew, went to the women who worked at their side. They had waited so long to get into homes of their own that there was some excuse for the noisy and foolish way they kept celebrating every escape from tent We Each bne of those rough-and-ready house-warmings house-warmings had meant an all-night party, with mouth organs and accordions ac-cordions and much to eat and drink Yet now and then a more gracious note had struck through the rougher noise. When the Saari family se date Finns from Wisconsin commemorated com-memorated their accession to their five-room bungalow of spruce logs they first sprinkled salt on the doorstep door-step and then conducted a service of prayer in the living room where the carpenters' shavings still Uttered the floor. (TO HE CONTINUED, |