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Show IJL By ARTHUR STRINGER w.h.u. service. 'U "You've had enough already," she said, quietly Impersonal. THE STORY SO FAR: To lave Norland Nor-land Airways from bankruptcy, Cruger has agreed to have his partner, Aian Blade, fly a so-called sclenUst named Frayne to the Anawotto in search of the breeding ground of the trumpeter swan. Slade's application for overseas service with the army air corps has been rejected, but he Is less disappointed when he learns that the company can stay In business, thanks to their client, who has paid enough to enable Cruger to buy a new plane, a Lockheed. And he Is pleased when Cruger tells him that Lynn Morlock, daughter of the "flying "fly-ing Padre" Is not going abroad with her Red Cross unit, Slade meets Lynn In town and goes with her to help a man who has been wounded in a fight. The wounded man turns out to be Slim Turn-stead, Turn-stead, a flyer who has lost his license for drinking and who is UtUe better than an outlaw. Now continue with the story. CHAPTER III Slade pressed closer as the yellow-faced man, wiping his hands on his apron, hurried out. The pock-marked man righted the table and chairs as Lynn busied herself loading a hypodermic. "How is he?" asked Slade. "He's all right," was the cool-noted response. "But there's a three-Inch three-Inch skull cut we'll have to close up. How did you get it?" Sllm's lips twitched. But he remained re-mained silent. "How about a drink first?" he suggested, as Lynn turned back to him. "You've had enough already," she said, quietly Impersonal. "Who gave you that jab?" persisted per-sisted Slade. The look of the room clearly proclaimed that the fight had been a regal one. Slim still declined to speak. It was the pock-marked man in the doorway door-way who broke the silence. "He got it from Wolf Winston," croaked the indignant landlord. "And it's another free-for-all chalked up against this place o' mine." "Quiet, please," was Lynn's cool-noted cool-noted admonition. Wolf Winston, Slade remembered, was a whisky-runner who'd repeatedly repeat-edly proved his adroitness at evading evad-ing the outstretched arm of the law. He also recalled that Slim, once the crack flyer for Colonial, had been twice grounded for drinking on duty. Still later he had been linked up with Edmonton Scotty's activities as a high-grader. And there'd been a rumor or two that of late he'd been running contraband liquor in from the coast ports. Slade felt sorry for Tumstead, just as he would feel sorry for any man of promise who threw away his chances. Among flyers, he knew, there was a free-masonry that made you forget a confrere's passing faults. But for a year now Slim 1 had seemed stubbornly headed for trouble. "This Is going to hurt a little," Lynn was saying as she sterilized a bullet-probe, "but we've got to make sure there's no glass in that cut before we close it up." "A drink would help a little," Slim once more suggested. "You can have a cigarette," she conceded, "when I put the stitches in." Slade produced the cigarette and held out his lighter. SUm looked up at him with an eye that was still indifferently derisive. de-risive. " "So the big boys took it away from you," he observed. "Took what away?" asked Slade, resenting the note of mockery. "That little tin-horn outfit of yours. I hear you're folding up." "Not on your life," countered Slade. "We've got a new ship and we're going stronger than ever." The indifferency went out of Turn-stead's Turn-stead's eye. "So you've got a new ship. That's certainly worth remembering." "Why?" challenged Slade. Tumstead shrugged. "Oh, I kind of thought the big fight had brought a famine in ships over here. Does that mean you're going to keep on flying the ice routes?" "I am," proclaimed Slade. "You'll change your tune," Slim said, "when you get the same dirty deal I got from Colonial." Slade backed away a little. He had the natural pride of the flyer in flying. And the thought that one of the best in the service could swing so far off-center gave him a sinking feeling. "I thought it was the other way round," he observed. Slim's eye-flash of hostility did not escape the younger pilot. "Oh, I go my own way," the man on the couch announced with a laugh that was not without bitterness. But a note of desolation in the voice brought a surge of pity through Slade. It was Lynn who spoke next. "You ought to have a week of rest," she observed as she encircled encir-cled her patient's head with a white gauze bandage that gave him the air of wearing a crown, slightly tilted. "Rest?" echoed Tumstead. His laugh was thin yet scornful. "I can't afford to rest, lady. I've got things to do." Lynn glanced about at the bloodstained blood-stained furniture. "You've lost a good deal of blood, remember. And you'll need a new dressing in a day or two. What you'd better do is see Sister Nadeau over at St. Gabriel's." "When?" asked the man with the bandaged head. "Tomorrow or next day," said Lynn as she closed her bag and stood up. "I won't be " But Tumstead, for some reason, left that sentence unfinished. He shrugged and glanced at Slade. Then his half-mocking gaze went back to Lynn. "I'd rather have you do my dressing dress-ing tomorrow," he said as he reached for her hand. Slade was nettled at the open insolence in that gesture. "Hasn't she done enough for you?" he demanded. Tumstead lifted a languid eye to his fellow-flyer. "Is she letting you make her decisions?" de-cisions?" he inquired. The derisive note in that inquiry brought Slade's gaze about to the girl's face. But in that face he found nothing to help him frame an answer. "Let's go," Lynn said with her first sign of impatience. Tumstead, stretched out full-length full-length on his couch, looked after them as they moved toward the door. "Since you're going," he said, still casually insolent, "which way are you heading? I mean you, Slade." The younger flyer swung about and studied the blanched face under its swathing bandages. "I'm flying into the Anawotto country tomorrow," he announced. Tumstead's lips made a whistling sound. "So they hooked you for that flight!" Slade, looking down, could see the older pilot smiling up at the ceiling. "What do you know about it?" he demanded. Tumstead continued to blink up at the ceiling. "Not a thing, son, not a thing," he answered with a listless sort of indifference. His movement as he turned to the wall was plainly one of dismissal. Slade felt happier when he found himself in the open sunlight, the balsam-scented open sunlight of spring, with Lynn walking along at his side. She was close beside him, yet he nursed an impression of her remoteness. And that impression took on an edging of pain as some inner voice told him she was the one thing in all the wide world he wanted. "So you're not going overseas?" he ventured as he noticed how the sunlight gave glints of gold to her mahogany-brown hair. "No, I'm going to meet Father at St Gabriel's," she answered casually, casu-ally, having discerned a light in his eyes which she found a little disturbing. dis-turbing. She was, he knew, evading the real issue. "And after that?" he prompted. "I'm flying north with Father in the morning," she announced. She found the courage, as she said it, to meet his gaze. "What made you change your mind?" asked Slade, puzzled by her loyalty to a life that was giving her so little of what other women clamored clam-ored for. "Father isn't young any more. He can't keep on forever. I was hoping hop-ing he'd give up a sort of work that's too hard for him." "And too hard for you," proclaimed pro-claimed Slade. He was remembering, remember-ing, at the moment, how she and the Flying Padre had been grounded by a blizzard, the winter before, and had kept life in their bodies by dining din-ing on their own mukluks of un-tanned un-tanned sealskin, well' boiled. That, Slade told himself, was no life for a girl. She was of too fine a fiber for such frontier roughness. It impressed him as too much like trying try-ing to grow a flower in a stamping mill. "Did your father ask you to stay on?" Slade questioned. "He'd never do that," was her prompt reply. "He's too big and fine to let his own interests come first." "Of course," said Slade, wondering wonder-ing if there was a hidden reproof in that reply. "But I was hoping," Lynn continued, con-tinued, "that Father would give up flying and settle down." Slade's smile was brief and slightly slight-ly bitter. "That," he affirmed, "is something some-thing not easy to get out of your system." "You'll have to, some day," she reminded him. He seemed to catch a faint glimmer glim-mer of hope from that. "There's only one thing," he said, "could ever turn me into a chair-warmer." chair-warmer." "What?" she asked. "You," he answered with unexpected unex-pected grimness. She did not look up at him. But she quickened her stride a little. . "I thought we weren't going into that again." He knew it was useless to argue the point But that newer look oi firmness in her face brought an answering an-swering firmness to his own slightly rebellious lips. For at the back oi his mind lurked a suspicion thai more and more refused to stay down. "Were you going to the front because be-cause Barrett Walden was there?" he asked. It was his effort to keep all trace of bitterness out of his voice, apparently, that brought a small and womanly smile to Lynn's lips. "Barrett Walden's not at the front," she said. "He's in an instruction in-struction camp at Aldershot" "But he wanted you to go overseas?" over-seas?" pursued her none too happy companion. "Barrett's been a very good friend to Father. He's never forgotten that Dad saved his life, and " "And you were his nurse at Fori St John for four weeks," cut in the unhappy Slade. "Father," Lynn was saying, "is very fond of Barrett And Barretl feels the same way about the Padre." She walked on in silence for a moment. "He's been trying to get him a berth in the Department of Mines at Ottawa." "Where he'd mope like a caged eagle," was Slade's slightly embittered embit-tered comment. "He's not the moping kind," protested pro-tested the girl. Slade made no comment on that. He remembered the flash of fire from those same eyes when he had once spoken of the Flying Padre's occupation as quixotic. "A flyer never wants to give up," he observed. Lynn came to a stop. The face she turned to her companion was a clouded one. "That's what frightens me, Alan," she quietly acknowledged. "They don't always stop in time." "The Padre knows the ropes all right," Slade protested. "But something happened last month," the girl was saying, "when we were flying in to Coronation. II was good weather and everything was going nicely, with Father at the controls. Then I saw that something some-thing was wrong. I had to jump in and straighten out the ship. Father, all of a sudden, didn't know where he was. Everything went blank, for a moment or two. He said, later, lat-er, it was like a switch turned ofl and then turned on again. But things like that mustn't happen to a flyer." Slade shrugged and smiled, mercifully merci-fully intent on easing the concern out of her eyes. "There's many a bush flyer gets over-tired," he casually affirmed. "That's what Father said. He claimed he'd been careless about his eating and had been going too hard. But when I saw him with those empty eyes and that cold sweat on his face, I knew it went deeper than he pretended." Slade forced a laugh. "He's clipped many a cloud since then. And he'll keep going until they ground him for old age." The clouded hazel eyes searched his face. "But can't you see, Alan, what I'm fighting for? Can't you understand under-stand how we all want security? How, when we love someone, we have to think of his future?" Slade looked down into the hazel eyes. Their loveliness sent a wave of recklessness through him. "It's your future I'd rather think of," he asserted. But the girl with the clouded eyes didn't seem to hear him. ' "I'm all Father has now." (TO BE CONTINUED) |