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Show Lamp & Vallevi W ARTHUR STWNOW T W N. UService THK STOHV sn tr.tn sumey l..,ut.r resoued Carol Coburn fiv.m the .,mo)i of Eric (the Red) -rio. She i, retufiili,,, to her native Alaska to teaoh. Her father. . ,ur. douKh. dlej wltn . ullprove mllo claim. La,Klt.r. en,.,l)eer (or Are you all right?" he asked. 'I in all right.- 1 told him. And a'ii'Pled to prove It by going out 'd bringing 1 the mud-smeared and forgotten blackboard. He stood watching me as I wiped the mud, and then what was unmistakably un-mistakably a bloodstain, from thnt Ignobly acquired symbol of authority. author-ity. Then, still without speaking, we stood rather foolishly looking into each other's eyes. "This won't happen again." he said with a steely sort of quietness. He glanced down at his bruised knuckles. "You know, of course, ; what that rabble-rouser wants to ! do? He wants to throw a scare Into I you. to frighten you out of your job, to make this valley intolerable." i "Why should he?': I asked. "1 think," answered Lander, "it's ; because he has Trumbull behind i him. There's more than one way, ! remember, of fighting a mine I claim." j A ghostly voice was telling me i that it would be sweet to lean ' against a wide shoulder like that, I whatever the outcome, until life lost a little of its uncertainty. A car horn sounded outside the shack. The door opened, and we stared at the rough and mannish : figure of Katie O'Connell. J "You're the bozo I want," was her ; grim-noted announcement. "We've ; got to get action here or there'll be hell to pay. There's three clear cases of measles in that tent col-J col-J ony. and about two hundred kids ; who've been exposed to it. Colonel ; Hart's gone over for the Anchorage i doctor, but that doesn't solve our I problem." "What is it you want?" asked Lander. "1 want Doctor Ruddock here." said Katie's prompt proclamation. "And inside of twenty-four hours I've got to have a hospital of some kind." "Then you'U get it," Lander said with reassuring curtness. "We've got the material and we've got two hundred workers." I "What workers?" challenged Ka-: Ka-: tie. "Those bindle stiffs in the CCC camp have just told me they're I walking out. They say they're on ; strike. And the building-gangs claim ' they have orders to stick to houses." ' "To hell with orders." barked ; Lander, "at a time like this. I say you'U get that hospital. And you'll ; get iu lady, before I take these boots off." : CHAPTER XVI S Action is eloquence, as Shake-I Shake-I speare once said, i Lander didn't fail the valley in i its time of need. And Katie got her i hospitaL ; All she got was a board shed in-I in-I terlined with plywood and roofed with tar paper, a bald-looking building build-ing with square windows and a row of army cots along one walk But it was shelter for Katie's patients. It didn't come easy. When Lander Lan-der put his pride in his pocket and talked to the transient workers he got nothing but jeers. For Eric the Red obviously, had been working on them. They declared they were already imposed on and underpaid. But Lander didn't give up. He hurriedly canvassed the colony tents and unearthed three men who had once done carpenter work. Then he went after the old-timers. He got Hans Wiebel. Then he got Sock-Eye Sock-Eye and the quick-handed father of Olie Eckstrom. and a stalwart ex-cabinetmaker ex-cabinetmaker who knew the meaning mean-ing of edged tools. The acid-spiriled Sam Bryson. it's true, flatly refused to come to our nelp But Salar.a just as flatly defied all paternal inunctions in-unctions and joined uP with the EThen the dirt began to fly. Hal an hour after the site and size of the building had been decided the pillars were bedded and the sills Fa d While I helped to lug two-by- ours from the track side lumber piles the wide-shouldered SaHjna strode back and forth foot boards on her back. She gio Hed in dumping her gigantic loads 'tine fee, of the bus, Lander nd . fct as we could carry ujc tTsound of hammer and saw tilled the valley. . jme of the busy workers. mey -Itn'tntftt sun began to shTep::dks " ree: tack. Butbythenthefloo Katie's brand-new Red Cr .. was flying from its peak ,he windows were scre'' t,,weif and drugs and dressings and f w fZ moots and - ; , earr,ed m :r;:xt- Everything looked so a Trumbull Co.. which la lighting the Co-burn Co-burn claim, brenki with Trumbull. But he remains engaged to Trumbull'l daughter. Barbara. Lander becomes field manager for the Mntanuaka Valley project. INSTALLMENT XIII Kntle hurriedly donned a uniform, as brand new as her Red Cross flag, and gave Instructions for the carrying carry-ing in of the sick children. There were seven of them by this time. And just as the Inst of them was being tucked Into bed Doctor Ruddock Rud-dock appeared In our midst and promptly announced that from that day forward he was to be recognized recog-nized as the otllcial man-of-medi-clne for the vnllcy project. I could see the glow that came into Katie's Celtic eye as she caught the significance of that announcement. announce-ment. "That's great," she said, with a quaver in her voice. Ho inspected the building and lamented the absence ab-sence of running water and laughed at tlie electric sterilizer, which couldn't be used, of course, until the completion of Die Project's generating gen-erating plant. "They're throwing money away on the wrong things," he said, after aft-er a quick appraisal of the supplies. sup-plies. And that seemed confirmed, two days later, when a motor ambulance ambu-lance was unloaded from a fiat car. a highly varnished and urban-looking ambulance designed for the use of the new Red Cross nurse. But Katie promptly cottoned to that vehicle, ve-hicle, which because of its sable paint scheme, she christened "Black Maria." But Katie soon had other things to think of. Two cases of scarlet fever fe-ver developed in our little tent city. "That's great," Katie said. And that stirred her Ruddy into still more frantic action. He bundled bun-dled his nurse off to an isolation tent in a clearing at the edge of the Wiebel farm and commanded her to carry on as best she could. "This is like stamping out a prairie prai-rie fire," he announced. "We've got to check it before it starts." Katie went without a murmur. I think she would have gone to the north pole if her abstracted man-of-medicine had ordered it. He boiled with indignation at the carelessness of the colony mothers. One neglected neglect-ed child, in spite of his warnings, developed pneumonia. And that brought a hurry call to me. "We've got to have help here," he said when I confronted him in his crowded little tent office. "And as I'm stopping all public assemblage, your schoolwork peters out and leaves you free." So I was not only a day-nurse and scrubwoman and deputy-marshal but also a human laundry and a stove-stoker and milK-distnoutor and oiler of desquamating little bodies bod-ies I took temperatures and changed sheets and doled out a gallon gal-lon of cathartics. I kept the shed warm at night and the sunny side screened by day. I patted soda solutions so-lutions on itchy little torsos and swabbed out spotted little mouths and baked sheets and played checkers check-ers with the convalescents and shooed overinquisitive urchins away from the door and went to bed so dog-tired that seven hours' sleep seemed nothing more than seven ticks of my alarm clock. But behind my back, all the while, life was going on as life has the habit of doing. For the colony wasn't without a valor all its own. Every mass migration. mi-gration. I felt, must have had its casual mishaps and touches of misery The misfits might rail at Ruddy and his health rules and the malcontents mal-contents might squat about the Commissary Com-missary porch and orate at the bureaucrats bu-reaucrats who were turning Mata-nuska Mata-nuska into something worse than l Russia But the real home .ljkPrs were already out on their plots getting a bit of land ready f,,r belated seeding or lending a a, building shelter for their ; iill(.d smek They were the hope : ,, the Project Ad amo.ie the women. 1 found. Carol and he both are enthuslaitlo about the future of the new colony. Eric. Uie Red. and a gang of worker bring Carol a blackboard and becomes Insulting. She faces them with a pistol. Lander arrives and . knocks Eric out there was the same division between be-tween the misery-mongers and the homemnkers. While the triple-chinned triple-chinned Betsy Sebeck sat on a chop-ping-block and railed at the Commissary Com-missary for ladling out coffee that wasn't dated and butter that smelt cheesy, a more energetic group of housewives were down at the salmon stream, with pitchforks, ladling out half ton of fresh fish, where the water was almost solid with red-meated red-meated bodies, which were promptly prompt-ly dressed and salted, or processed and canned and stowed away against a rainy day. Some of them, I noticed, had already planted sweet peas along the black-earthed terraces ter-races in front of their still unfinished houses. They made my own humble wicky-up, wicky-up, when Ruddy's prairie fire was finally stamped out and I moved back to my home on the Jansen clearing, seem a very small and antiquated affair. The quietness oppressed op-pressed me. I was glad when Katie dropped in. But her spirits, for once, seemed anything but light and airy. "What's on your mind?" I demanded. de-manded. "A couple of snapshots," was Katie's Ka-tie's rather cryptic answer. "Snapshots of what?" I asked. "Of a snip of a surgical nurse down In thaV Seattle hospital," the gloomy-eyed Katie replied. "Ruddy "Rud-dy just showed 'em to me. He seems to think she's the last word in womanhood." Life, I felt when Katie went on her way again, was a dolorously muddled-up affair. It didn't make a good beginning for my first night back in the wicky-up. wicky-up. And, a little later, it was crowned by a still more unpleasant thing. For most unmistakably, on that first midnight of my new loneliness, somebody came to my cabin and tried to force the door open. I wasn't sure just how much pressure pres-sure my crossbar would stand. So I groped about in the darkness, after aft-er slipping out of my bunk, and made a search for Sock-Eye's revolver. re-volver. I waited, with the big sLx-gun in my hand, until the sounds began again. Then I deliberately Bred a shot at the wall, as a gentle reminder remind-er of what that would-be intruder might expect. The warning, apparently, wasn't wasted. For nothing but silence, after that awful roar of sound, came to my ears. But, even though I took Sock-Eye's six-gun to bed with me, it was a long time before I could go to sleep. CHAPTER XVII Long before this colony was thought of there was a small school at Matanuska Village. It was housed in what had once been a wooden-fronted wooden-fronted trading post. Its floors had heaved with the frosts of many a long winter, its walls had sagged, and its roof leaked like a sieve. Sam Bryson, its owner, soured by his removal as district superintendent, refused to lift a hand in repairing the old wreck. The CCC workers were equally recalcitrant. So Lander Lan-der marshaled a corps of volunteers volun-teers and tackled the job. The undulating un-dulating floor was made level once more; the side walls were patched and straightened; two new windows were put in. and the roof was made waterproof. They also built a double dou-ble row of rough little desks and replaced the rusty old drum stove with a new and shining air-tight heater, to say nothing of four equally equal-ly bright and shining gas lamps. The Project officials may have been short on labor but they proved prodigal enough with supplies. For they promptly shipped in six gross of blackboard wipers and a half truckload of chalk boxes and enough paper and pencils to run a state university. They also, ironically enough, sent a nickel and enamel water-cooler and an electric fan, both of them, of course, quite useless. use-less. But all shipments of textbooks must have fallen by the wayside. S'lary, openly defying her acidulous acidu-lous old dad, helped me sandpaper the rough little chair desks and sweep up shavings and brighten the windows with chintz. When I asked S'lary, as we worked there side by side, if it wouldn't be easier to pursue her studies in such surroundings, she startled me by the vigor of her revolt. "Me plant my carcass in one o' them kid seats?" she indignantly demanded. de-manded. "Me squat here and do sums with a bunch of undersized cheechakos who ain't able t' wipe their own noses? Not me." She was conscious of my frown of disapproval as I watched those full and rose-red lips framing language so unsuited to the seeker ot culture. "Pop's been wonderin'," she observed ob-served with a new meekness in her smoldering eyes, "if you couldn't come and teach me private. And one? I got f handlin' a pen as easy as I handle a rifle, he allows, I'd be ready t' go outside and havi t winter in the States." (TO BE CONTINUED) |