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Show Me Lamp Valle BY ARTHUR STRINGER JT -V JM W. N, U. Service r Carol Coburn Is Alaska born, tht daughter of Klondlk. Coburn. "bush rat . who died with n unestabllshed mining claim. Carol li returning north to teach In an Indian school. THE STORY SO FAR Aboard ship, she is annoyed by Eric (th Red) Erlcson, an agitator. She ll rescued by a young engineer. They talk of the changes that had come to the north, and of course a good deal about themselves. It la a INSTALLMENT II dark night on the deck of a ship and they chat quite freely. Carol tells of working her way through university and of a trip to Europe as companion of a rich man's daughter. "That was a break," he says. it was, I agreed. "It was all rather wonderful. But it made me feel like a deserter. And it was too good to last Just when I was telling myself I had about everything every-thing one could ask for, I got a letter let-ter from Alaska, nearly seven months old." "Telling you what?" prompted the voice at my side. "Telling me my father had been found dead on the open trail," I answered, doing my best to be casual casu-al about it. "He'd been found there, frozen to death, between his Chakitana Chaki-tana claim and Trail-End Camp. His grub bag was empty. Two of bis dogs had died and the others must have left him In the night. I can't help thinking of that lonely grave between the hills when you talk about the uselessness of the sourdough." "I'm sorry," said my companion, with a quick note of contrition. He stood beside me, for a full minute of silence. "Where was your father's fa-ther's claim on the Chakitana?" "That's what I've got to find out," I told him. "But it seems to be "I was beginning to feel It was an oppressively big one," I said as I stared out over the lonely hills. "How long," he asked, "will you be at Toklutna?" "For at least a year," I told him. "But why do you ask?" "Because I think I'll be seeing you," he said, without the slightest trace of levity. CHAPTER n It wasn't until the crowding and confusion of our shore stop at Cordova Cor-dova that I saw Sidney Lander again. Then I caught sight of him on the dock, stooping over a wire-covered wire-covered crate. He let out a longhaired long-haired sheep dog which disdained the chop bone held out in front of it The quivering animal merely flung itself on its master, whimpering and crazy with joy. "This is Sandy," he said as he stroked the dog's nose. "There's just Sandy and me." "I'm flying in to the Chakitana," he said. "But Sandy doesn't like air travel." I could feel his eyes on I liked in that new valley of loneliness. loneli-ness. She had Irish gray eyes, a sense of humor, and a frame like a man's. She was, I discovered, really real-ly a graduate nurse and should have worn a uniform. But she bowed to the law of the frontier and dressed that muscular body of hers in mannish-looking flannel shirts and khaki breeches and high-laced hunting boots. At Toklutna she plainly found plenty to do. For of the thirty-seven children in our school three had tubercular tu-bercular neck glands, two had congenital con-genital hip disease, and another dozen doz-en either ear trouble or ominoui chest coughs. They were the offspring off-spring of the once stalwart Eskimo and the noble red man of the North, proving how mercilass the hand of mercy could sometimes be. Our civilization, civ-ilization, plainly, hadn't done much for those misfits. We thought we'd been helping them, but all we did was take away their stamina and pauperize them. We left them so improvident they came to regard it as foolish to go out and fish and hunt and trap. So they let the white man bask in the glory of the white man's burden. bur-den. They gave up and wallowed in shiftlessness and loafed about in rags and mated and reproduced and passed their ill-begotten offspring over to Toklutna o feed and clothe and make into good little Americans. Ameri-cans. Miss Teetzel, I soon discovered, did her best to keep the native girls in the school from talking with the old women of the outside settlement. For these verminous old squaws had a lot of tribal superstitions they tried to pass on to the youngsters. According Ac-cording to Miss O'Connell, they made a practice of not letting their firstborn first-born children live, especially the Copper River Indians who believed that if their first little papoose lasted only until he was eight or nine months old his father went straight to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Katie O'Connell, in fact, was on the warpath because of an Indian couple who sneaked over into the Matanuska Valley with their seven-months-old baby, ostensibly on a , hunting trip. But if they came back without that papoose, our grim-eyed j nurse proclaimed, she was going to have them locked up for life. Miss Teetzel took the savor out of my mission. She also quietly contrived con-trived to make me as uncomfortable as possible. She seemed to feel that the scrub brush was a major factor in pedagogics. But Sidney Lander was right. I hadn't much to work on at Toklutna. The little slant-eyed Eskimos, I found, were both brighter and merrier-minded than the Siwash chil. dren. They all seemed fond of music, mu-sic, though, especially the march music Katie and I pounded out on the old school organ. So the two of us concluded that a little dancing might brighten up the emptiness of their evenings. We tried putting them through an old-fashioned square dance or two. And just when the fun was at its highest Miss Teetzel appeared and looked me over with that sardonic eye of hers. "I'm afraid," she observed, "that you're a trifle too modern for us." I had to swallow it, of course. But after that we were restricted to group-singing and saluting the flag and a handful of dolorous old hymns which my Siwash charges translated translat-ed into a pagan chant of woe. As I quartered back across the schoolyard, after stopping a fight between be-tween two of my little redskin warriors war-riors (based on a can of tinned cow stolen from the kitchen), I bumped into Doctor Ruddock, who looked us over once a week. He stopped, with his black bag in his hand, and rather solemnly looked me over. "You're not very happy here," he said. "How'd you like a whack Instead of answering me he led me toward the gangplank. my face. "You go on to Seward, of course?" "Then in to Toklutna," I said. "It would be funny, wouldn't it, if we found ourselves on the same trail there?" he said. "What does that mean?" I asked, when the Yukon's warning whistle gave me a chance to speak again. Instead of answering me he led me toward the gangplank over Which the last of the passengers were crowding aboard. The smile faded from his face as he stood there, with my hand in his. He neither spoke nor said good-by. But his eyes, as he looked down at me, did things to my heart action. For my woman's wom-an's instinct told me that something some-thing was- stirring deep in that bear cave of silence. Those eyes, I felt, were saying something that his lips seemed afraid to put into words. All the way to Resurrection Bay, in fact, I felt oddly alone in the world. It seemed less and less like going home. Yet I knew, once we reached Seward, that I was back on the frontier. But when I found myself face to face with that solemn big school-house school-house surrounded by a straggle of cabins that made it look like a mother moth-er hen surrounded by her chicks, no sense of high adventure reposed in my arrival. It was Miss Teetzel who spoiled somewhere along the Three-Finger Range between the Cranberry and Blackwater Pass. Father, you see, was just an old-fashioned sourdough. He was always brooding about some final strike that was going to make him a millionaire. And he always felt there was a fortune in that mine of his, once it was opened up. It was his secret And he hugged it tight, even from me." "But the important point is, did he establish his claim?" "I'm afraid not," I had to admit. "That's one of the things I've got to find out." He leaned closer, as though trying to decipher my face in the starlight. I found myself moving away a little. Lonely ladies, after midnight on starlit nights at sea, needed the feel of something solid under their feet "It was kind of you," I said as I drew my polo coat closer about me, "to help me as you did." But he disregarded that valedictory valedic-tory note. "I don't even know your name," he reminded me. Names, on a night like that didn't seem to mean much. We were up between the stars, I wanted to tell him, where time and titles didn't count. "Who are you?" I found myself asking, foolishly glad because of his nearness. He didn't answer me at once. And in that moment of silence I summoned sum-moned up courage to reach for the forgotten flashlight. Then I pressed the button and framed his stooping head in a sudden shaft of light I gulped as the light fell on his face. That face was strong and bronzed and touched with a quiet audacity that went well with his big frame. But I had seen it before, in an altogether different setting. For this was the mackintoshed man who had stood in the rain with a blonde and blue-eyed girl in his arms before be-fore the Yukon pulled out from the Seattle wharf. He had been so absorbed ab-sorbed in that last clasp that he al-I al-I most missed getting aboard. The memory of that scene promptly prompt-ly chilled and steadied me. An ice wall as wide as the Columbia Glacier Gla-cier seemed to drift in between us. "I don't suppose it makes much difference," he said 6ut of that silence, si-lence, "but my name is Lander, Sidney Sid-ney Lander." "No, it doesn't make much difference," dif-ference," I heard myself saying in an oddly thinned voice. "Why?" he demanded, conscious of that remoter note. "We'll probably never see each other again." I said with a limping enough effort at indifference. "But I think we will," he corrected cor-rected with unexpected solemnity. My hand, resting on the rail, could feel his bigger hand close over it. "Hasn't Eric the Red done enough of that?" I asked in an adequately frosted voice. The man who called himself Sidney Sid-ney Lander promptly lifted his hand away. "But I still want to know your name," he quietly reminded me. "I think you owe me that much. I laughed and stood silent a moment. mo-ment. , , ,.' T "My name's Carol Coburn, I finally admitted, "free, white and twenty-one, and heading back to the icebound hills of her birth." Coburn?" he repeated. And his voice impressed me as almost a startled one. "Carol Koyukuk Coburn, I announced, an-nounced, "with the Koyukuk usually usual-ly suppressed." "What was your father s name? be asked. ..,.-His ..,.-His real name," I said, was Kenneth Coburn. But back on the creeks he was known as Klondike ThaT'brought silence between us acain And when the man beside me spoke, it was in an oddly altered voice. . . , It's a small world, isn t it. I didn't at the moment, see much point to that observation. everything. For Miss Teetzel, the school head, proved to be a somewhat some-what dehydrated spinster with an eye like a bald-headed eagle's and a jaw like a lemon squeezer. I could see her disapproving glance go over my person, from my gray tweed cap with its rather cocky Tyrolean Ty-rolean feather to my frivofcus suede pumps. I plainly didn't fit in with her idea of what a teacher should be. I didn't much mind being consigned con-signed to the smallest and meanest room in the big old building. But I couldn't overlook the spirit of hostility hostil-ity with which I was ushered into my far-north mission. For that spirit spir-it expressed itself, once I'd unpacked, un-packed, in the first task with which Miss Teetzel confronted me. It was to take charge of the washing from the children's ward. And it was rather a septic mess to get clean, even with the power machine which Miss O'Connell showed me how to operate. But I knew the lemon-squeezer lemon-squeezer lady was playing an operatic op-eratic air or two on the keyboard of my endurance. So I put on my rubber gloves, and shut my teeth, and went through with my job. It wasn't until my third day at Toklutna that I had a chance to humanize hu-manize the cell-like baldness of my room. Miss O'Connell helped me do the decorating. And this same Katie O'Connell proved herself the one girl at a school over at Wasilla?" My first impulse was to tell him that I didn't believe in running away from things. But I said, instead, that I was waiting for rather an important im-portant report from the Record Office Of-fice at Juneau. He glanced at the shabby old barracks bar-racks that overshadowed us. "Well, if they crowd you too hard here, let me know. I can pull a string or two, when you're ready. And that Matanuska Valley, if I don't miss my guess, is going to be very much on the map." The memory of that message didn't stay with me as long as it might have. For on my way to my room Katie O'Connell handed me a letter from Sidney Lander. It had come out from Chakitana by airplane air-plane and had been mailed at Fairbanks. Fair-banks. The writer of that letter said that I had been very much in his thoughts. But the comforting little glow a message like that could bring just under one's floating ribs was cut short by the further message mes-sage that the sooner I could marshal all data and documents in connection connec-tion with my father's Chakitana claim the more definite it would make Lander's course of action in the immediate future. "The Trumbull Trum-bull outfit and I are parting company," compa-ny," it concluded. (TO BE CONTINUED) |