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Show Ike Lamp Vallei By ARTHUR STRINGER JL W. N. U. Service THE STORY SO FAR Sidney Lander rescued Carol Coburn from the annoyances ol Eric (the Red) Ericson. She is returning to her native Alaska to teach. Her father, a sour-dough, sour-dough, died with an unproven mine claim. Lander, an engineer for the Trumbull Co.. which Is fighting the Co-burn Co-burn claim, breaks with Trumbull. But be remains engaged to Trumbull's daughter, Barbara. Carol tells Barbara she Is not after Lander. Salaria Bry-son, Bry-son, an outdoors girl, Is also in love INSTALLMENT XI with Lander. Trumbull Invites Carol to fly with him to the scene to see that her father had no real claim. She declines, de-clines, however, and her manner nettles the mine king. He Is used to having things bis own way. But his voice, when he spoke, was both suave and controlled. "Don't run away with the idea this Chakitana claim is my only trouble," trou-ble," he said. "I've got mine interests inter-ests that take me from the Circle right down to Mexico. And I like ' to clear things up as I go along." Once again I recognized the deep rumble of big business.. But the thought of my father's lone grave somewhere out along the tangled trails of the Chakitana confirmed me in my own blind course of opposition. opposi-tion. "We turn in here," I explained, D indicating the oozy path that led to my shack front, "Do you mean you're satisfied with this sort of thing?" he demanded, demand-ed, his contemptuous gaze on my littered lit-tered dooryard, left so unlovely by the spring thaw. "I'd like It better if I had a Bchool," I said. John Trumbull sat watching me as I climbed down from the car seat. "What would you say If I put a few thousand into a school for you," he said with what impressed me as a purely achieved matter-of-factaess, "as good a school as they've got anywhere in this Territory?" It was my turn to remain silent as I looked up into those glacier-ice glacier-ice eyes of his. And I remembered my old school maxim about fearing the Greeks when they come bearing bear-ing gifts. "Does my claim impress you as worth that much?" I found the courage cour-age to demand. His color deepened, apparently Record Office chair-warmers. And we'll have to depend on Canby." "Trumbull's going to lose out, remember, re-member, on his first round," Lander Lan-der was explaining. "That report shows your father's naturalization papers can be confirmed. It'll leave the issue hinging on the question of clear or clouded title definition. And that issue may have to be decided out on the Chakitana." He then turned to the task in Matanuska. "Things are going to be different around here," he confidently affirmed. af-firmed. "They've got to, or there'll be hell to pay. And it'll be a man's size job, making this muddle ready for those two hundred families." "Isn't it a trifle late for that?" I asked as I filled my two crockery cups with hot tea. Lander admitted that it was. But that, he contended, was just why we had to pitch in and help. "You'll get a school, of course," he went on as he abstractedly stirred his tea. "And we'll have to have a hospital of some sort. And a Red Cross nurse. And a marshal to keep order in those transient-camps. And someone to speed up the building-gangs building-gangs and stop all this bungling about supplies and the eternal buck-passing buck-passing that's mainly responsible for the mess they're in." "I want to help," I said. Something Some-thing in my voice brought an approving ap-proving smile from the man across the bald pine table. "In two weeks," he said, "we'll have a radio station here, to link with the embarrassment of a contestant con-testant who has underestimated the power of his opponent. "What it's worth won't be decided by either you or me," he said in an unexpectedly sharpened voice. "But I was hoping we could get together to-gether on it in some friendlier way." "I happen to be Klondike Coburn's daughter," I reminded him. That brought a steelier look into his averted eyes. "I was trying to forget that," he retorted, almost in a bark. "But hate and stupidity, you'll find, won't get you far." "I'll get along," I said, forcing a smile of assurance. And as I stood confronting him I began to nurse a new and sharper fellow feeling for Sidney Lander. He too had refused to be crushed by that human car of Juggernaut. John Trumbull started his engine and threw in his clutch. "You may not last here as long as you imagine," he asserted as he swung about my dooryard and headed for the road. day night, for our relief -roll, toilers. And I want to get a line on the bad actors in that bunch." "I'll be seeing you," I acquiesced in the offhanded note of the frontier. "Fine," said Lander as he waited for Salaria to climb into the truck. It was many a year since I'd seen an Alaska jamboree of that kind, and it left me wondering if life hadn't rather spoiled me for such affairs. For along with the dancing danc-ing was much brawling and love-making love-making and the imbibing of a local lo-cal brand of hooch known as moose-milk. moose-milk. The orchestra was merely a tinny old piano helped out by a fiddle and accordion. Even as we pushed our way into that crowded roadhouse with its open bar I wondered won-dered if the natives weren't doing the best to revive the old Klondike days. Men in flannel shirts and high-tops high-tops gyrated about with gum-chewing white women in slacks or held well-rouged and sloe-eyed half-breed girls in calico close to their Macki-nawed Macki-nawed bosoms. Lander danced with a smooth se-dateness se-dateness that left us almost conspicuous conspic-uous in that swarm of jigging bodies bod-ies and flying heels. And I felt oddly odd-ly small and passive in that strong arm of his. The sense of his nearness, near-ness, I suppose, should have made me happy. But I couldn't drum up any enthusiasm en-thusiasm for that falsetto and loose-jointed loose-jointed hilarity born of bad music and worse whisky. I tried to tell my partner that there was something pathetic in such childlike efforts to escape the isolation isola-tion of wilderness life. But Lander only laughed. "This is easy," he said. "There'll be a broken head or two before the night's over." There'd even been a stabbing, the week before. But I had no craving to see fist-fights fist-fights and knifeplay. "I want to go home," I said at the end of our dance. For along the line that crowded the bar I'd caught sight of Eric the Red, surrounded by a circle of transients. He was too busy drinking and talking to give any thought to dancing. But his sardonic smile as we passed within six paces of him confirmed my distaste dis-taste for the place. "All right," said Lander. Yet I knew by the way his gaze lingered on the flushed and bleary-eyed faces all about him that he would have preferred to stay. The air outside was sweet with a small wind that blew down from the Talkeetnas. "I guess this is better," he sai3 as he tucked a blanket about my knees and climbed in beside me. He was silent for a while, tooling the truck along the spectral ribbon of a road. "I'm afraid I took you away from your work," I ventured. Lander laughed as that none-too-even road kept our swaying bodies in rough but friendly contact "That's about the best I can ask of life," he said. "To be next to you like this." My answering laugh, I suppose, was largely defensive. "While we both remember to keep to the center of the road," I suggested. sug-gested. "It'll be a better road before we're through with it," the resonant low voice beside me announced. He was speaking in riddles, of course. Yet I knew well enough what he meant. "But where will it lead to?" I asked. "I don't know, yet," he answered after a moment's silence. "But I don't want it to lead me from you." "Hasn't it already done that?" I questioned. It may have sounded a bit cruel. He turned and made an effort to study my face in the none-too-certain light. "I thought we meant something to each other," he said with a quick and boylike candor that was more disarming than all the earlier riddles. rid-dles. "I rather thought you liked me." "I do," I said in an effort to match casualness with casualness. But that, plainly, didn't solve his problem. He drove on in silence until he came to the narrower trail that led in to my shack. "I suppose there's somebody else?" he finally ventured, coming to a stop in the cabin clearing. "There's nobody else," I was honest hon-est enough to acknowledge. "That's all I wanted to know," he said with a new resoluteness in his voice. I was more afraid of myself, I think, than I was of him. I didn't like the way my heart was pounding as he got down from his seat and crossed to my side of the truck. "With me there is nobody else," I compelled myself to say. I knew, by the way he stiffened, that my shot had hit its mark. "You're right," he quietly acknowledged. ac-knowledged. Then he laughed his curt laugh. "I guess I'm running a little ahead of the game." I felt like calling after him, as he backed and turned and went lurching lurch-ing out to the highway. (TO BE COST1M EDJ CHAPTER XIH Saturday, of course, meant a day off for the valley chalk-wrangler. But a day off didn't mean idleness. idle-ness. I had my mending and darning darn-ing to do, my sourdough sponge to work into loaves, and my house to put in order after six days of neglect. neg-lect. I'd baked my bread, and finished fin-ished my washing and ironing, and with the fortitude of the true frontiersman fron-tiersman was just filling my big woodbox with neatly split spruce boles when a truck rumbled up to my door. It was a rather official-looking truck of battleship-gray, similar to those I'd seen of late about the Administration Camp at Palmer. And it startled me a little when Lander Lan-der swung down from the driver's seat. He looked tired and a trifle solemn. "I suppose you know what that means?" he said as I continued to stare at the truck. He laughed, rather rath-er curtly, when I told him I was entirely in the dark. "It means I'm field manager for the Matanuska Valley Project." From my silence he seemed to reap some final impression of disappointment. dis-appointment. "I suppose you think I've failed you?" he said, more solemn than ever. "In what?" I asked, resenting his power to interfere with my heart action. "In marking time this way about your Chakitana claim," he observed as he followed me into the shack. "I can live without that mine," I found myself saying. 0"But nobody likes to be robbed," Lander observed as he thrust some papers into my hand. One of those papers, I noticed, was my father's dog-eared certificate of citizership. And as I glanced down at the faded portrait appended to it I realized I was looking at the face of a fighter. It made me stiffen my shoulders. "We can't, of course, pick our ground for this particular fight," Lander was saying. "We have to know our enemy's line of attack. And in this case he seems to be playing safe and turning to court procedure and trying to make everything ev-erything look legal." "Then what can we do?" I asked. "I have Canby working for us at Juneau," Lander explained. "He's both dependable and resourceful. But you can't, of course, hurry those "You'll get a school, of course." us up with the outside worla. That'll take us out of the wilderness, at f one jump. And before winter we'll have electric lights and telephones and cold storage and a cannery and snug homes for every one of those two hundred families." I thought of the undug wells and the unfinished roads and the carloads car-loads of cement that had been left to harden along the railwa' siding. "You know, of course, that your friend Ericson is in the transient-camp transient-camp here?" Lander asked. I disclaimed any friendship between be-tween Eric the Red and myself. "That's just the point," proceeded my visitor. "He's as yellow as they make them. And two days ago he had a talk with John Trumbull up at the Happy Day." "What's that to me?" I asked with what was only a pretense at indifference. in-difference. "Trumbull," he explained, "is pretty ruthless. There are mighty few road rules left when he starts steamrolling toward his own selfish self-ish ends." "I've been talking with Colonel Hart," he added. "And he agrees with me we've got to have a medical medi-cal man here. There's a chance he'll bring Doctor Ruddock over from Toklutna. And I've put in a word for your friend Katie O'Con-nell. O'Con-nell. There's no reason she couldn't swing in as a Red Cross nurse." A wave of joy went through me. Katie, I realized, would be an answer an-swer to prayer. Just then Salaria appeared at my door, brown and wind-blown. In the crook of her arm she carried a rifle and over one shoulder swung a full game bag. Her dusky eyes rested rather hungrily on the silent Lander. "You goin' my way, old-timer?" she inquired, indicating the truck in the dooryard. Lander's gaze met mine for a moment I could see the heat-lightning smile that hovered about his lips. "Right to your door. S'lary." Lander Lan-der answered her, with a hand-wave toward his truck. It was while the Artemis with the rille was still frowning over some faint tinge of mockery in his voice that Lander turned back to me. "How about coming to Wasilla tonight?" to-night?" he asked. "They have a roadhouse dance there, every Satur- |