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Show -yU By ARTHUR STRINGER w.n.u.servic& 1 iiMB x "Quite an arsenal you're taking in," he observed. THE STORY SO FAR: Alan Slide bas agreed to fly a "scientist" named Frayne to the Anawotto river to look for the breeding ground of the trumpeter fwan. It Is bleak country, and Alan suspects Frayne of having something up his sleeve, but Norland Airways needs the Job. Slade and his partner, Cruger, have been having trouble competing with the larger companies, and Frayne has paid enough to enable Cruger to buy the plane they need. When be thought Norland was going to have to quit, Slade applied for overseas service with the army air corps. Uls application was rejected, but his disappointment has been lessened considerably by the brighter outlook for the business and by the fact that Lynn Morlock, the local doctor's daughter, has decided not to go to England with her Red Cross unit. Now he has gone with Lynn while she gives first aid treatment to an outcast flyer named Slim Tumstead, who has been hurt In a fight. They learn that Tumstead knows about Frayne and about the new Lockheed. It Is a few minutes later, and they are talking about their plans for the future. Lynn feels that she must think first of her father's happiness. Now continue with the story. CHAPTER IV "But you mustn't forget," Slade contended, "that you have your own life to live." "That's what I'm trying to remember," re-member," was Lynn's vibrant-voiced vibrant-voiced reply. They came to a stop in front of the hospital steps. "Some day," he said with a wave of recklessness, "I'll make you see It my way." If it sounded like a threat it brought no touch of concern to the hazel eyes searching his face. A smile even hovered about her lip ends. "You've got a harder Job than that," she retorted, "if you're flying in to the Anawotto tomorrow." Then the smile disappeared. "By the way, I saw that ornithologist who's flying in with you. He was 'asking me what I knew about the country north of the Kasakana." "Is he as screwy as he sounds?" asked Slade. "He's far from screwy," was Lynn's slightly retarded answer. "He struck me as being cold and hard and shrewd. And I can't figure fig-ure out what he's after. It rather makes me wish someone else was piloting him into that wilderness." Slade was able to laugh, as they shook hands. "Don't lose sleep over that," he proclaimed. Then he laughed again. "I've flown some queer nuts into the North." Slade, hurrying down to the air barbor, could see his moored plane being warped in to the landing dock. On the dock itself he could make out Cassidy, of the Norland staff, ' and two strange figures, one more massive than the other. But what held his eye was the amount of duffel piled along the dock's edge. As Cruger had told him, they were giving him a load all right Even Cassidy's broad face broke into a smile as he handed him the scales-slip. scales-slip. For Slade's glance, at the moment, mo-ment, was directed toward the two men already interested in getting their equipment aboard. He resented resent-ed the offhand way in which the bigger big-ger of the two strangers was clambering clam-bering about his ship. The worn wolfskin coat that covered the wide shoulders of this stranger made him look shabby and subordinate. When the pilot turned to his second sec-ond passenger he experienced a sense of disappointment touched with shame. For there seemed nothing noth-ing sinister about the straitened and scholarly figure confronting him. That figure even failed to look foolish. fool-ish. Slade saw a man considerably less aged than he had expected, a man with sloping and narrow shoulders shoul-ders and an abstracted gaze that looked out on the world from behind bifocal glasses. Slade stepped closer. "Quite a load you're giving me," he ventured as the man in the bifocal bi-focal glasses continued to divide his attention between the duffel pile and a checklist in his hand. The abstracted eyes lifted and regarded re-garded him for a moment of silence. It was the glasses more than -anything else, Slade decided, that gave the stranger his look of deliberation. delibera-tion. "Why does that interest you?" the stranger inquired. His tone was mild and without hostility. But the voice, low-toned and remote, seemed marked by an exotic precision of intonation. It persuaded Slade that he was neither an Englishman nor an American. "This happens to be my ship," the pilot explained as he rested a fraternal hand on the sun-faded fuselage. "Ah, then we shall see much of each other," said the other. His smile was friendly but abstracted. "I am Doctor Frayne. And this is my camp-mate, my good man Friday, Fri-day, Caspar Karnell." No responsive word came from the big-bodied man in the wolfskin coat. He merely stood above the cabin hatch, his eyes expressionless. expression-less. "Caspar is not shall I say? voluble," vol-uble," observed the Doctor. A mild and forebearing smile wrinkled the scholarly face behind the glasses. "And that, I might also explain, is why we travel together." Slade, after an inspection of the bland emptiness of Karnell's face, nodded bis understanding. "They tell me I'm to take you in to the Anawotto," prompted the bush pilot "That is my desire," answered Dr. Frayne. "It may so happen that we shall winter up north." "Down north," Slade corrected. "We speak of it here as downnorth." The man with the abstracted eyes ventured a shrug. "With time," he said, "I shall become be-come better acquainted with your country." His movement, as he swung a bag of what had every aspect as-pect of mining tools up to his companion, com-panion, was almost a dismissive one. "Prospecting?" questioned Slade. "I am not interested in prospecting," prospect-ing," was the deliberated answer. "I am a naturalist." ' As though in confirmation of that statement he lifted a case of mounted mount-ed bird bodies up to his waiting companion. Then again the forced smile showed itself. "It may impress you as a foolish profession. But for many years now I have given my time to the study of bird life." Slade glanced down at the Mann-licher-Schoenauer, the two holstered Lugers, the pair of shotguns of different dif-ferent gauges and weight that rested rest-ed between a scattering of cartridge cases. "Quite an arsenal you're taking tak-ing in," he observed. For just a moment the opaque eyes regarded him. "I am not unfamiliar with the North," Frayne announced with a patience that seemed coerced. "It is well, in case of the unexpected, to be able to live off the .land." "Of course," agreed Slade as he watched the firearms being stowed aboard. They were followed by a tent bale and sleeping bags, by condensed con-densed foods with foreign labels, by camp equipment and a box of signal flares and cased instruments and even two carrier pigeons in a hooded hood-ed cage. "You've filling me pretty full," observed ob-served Slade. Frayne's face remained expressionless. expres-sionless. "Any inconvenience that I may cause," he said, "I profoundly regret re-gret I had hoped, on arriving here, to purchase a plane. But they are not to be bought, I find." "There's use for 'em just now," observed the pilot. "We're in the war, you know." The eyes behind the bifocals became be-came less opaque. "But here at least," observed the man of science, "I shall not see it come between me and my research." re-search." "The office tells me you're after trumpeter swans," said Slade. "I am seeking the nesting ground of that noble bird," acknowledged the ornithologist. "They are extremely ex-tremely shy and hard to find in the brooding season. That is why I go into an empty country like the Anawotto." Ana-wotto." Slade, not unconscious of the pedagogic ped-agogic note, felt the need of proving prov-ing that his interests extended beyond be-yond gas engines. "Ever try for them around the Red Rock Lakes in Yellowstone?" he asked. "They started a refuge for trumpeters there not so far back." "A refuge which will be a failure," was the prompt response. "Your trumpeter is a child of the wilds. He cannot be adjusted to confinement." confine-ment." His new friend, Slade admitted, seemed to know his bird life all right. His eye-squint deepened as he noticed no-ticed two heavier cases being lifted aboard. "By the way, are you taking tak-ing radio or wireless in with you?" "Why should I do that?" Frayne questioned. "It is with the lady swan I wish to converse." "But how'll you come out?" asked Slade. "How'll we know where to pick you up?" Frayne's gaze again became diffused. dif-fused. "That may not be'necessary," he finally explained. "We shall perhaps per-haps work our way through to what are locally known as the Barrens and come out along your Hudson Bay coast It is. a country you may happen to know?" Slade smiled. "I know it all right As much as a white man can know such ice-fringed ice-fringed emptiness." The bush pilot found himself being be-ing inspected with a new interest "That is extremely good news," averred his passenger. "As we fly north, I hope you will give me information in-formation about a country that is still distressingly unknown to me." Slade resisted the temptation to observe that it wouldn't be so unknown un-known to him by the time he'd wintered there. "But you won't get swans as far east as the bay," he pointed out instead. "At least, not trumpeters." Frayne's smile became more friendly. "Already," he announced, "you are helping me. And there is another an-other point on which you might enlighten en-lighten us. Is the Anawotto River navigable?" "No, it's not navigable," answered an-swered Slade. "It's blocked by too many falls and rapids. That's what's kept the country closed. Even Tyrrell Tyr-rell couldn't get into it." "But there were no planes when Tyrrell made his survey," observed the scholar. "It's sure empty country," asserted assert-ed the pilot, who had his own memories mem-ories of the Anawotto. "That" murmured the swan hunter, hunt-er, "is entirely to my liking." "But you're not entirely to my liking," was the thought that hovered hov-ered about at the back of Slade's head. Lynn, he felt, was right Yet he was their Santa Claus, as Cruger had expressed it. He had paid well for service, and he'd get service. Slade dismissed that thought and turned to study the silver-winged Lockheed that rested on the waters of the Snye. It looked spick and span in its new coat of aluminum. He realized, as he swung about, that the man in the bifocal glasses was also studying the Lockheed. "An attractive ship," the scientist observed. "It was my intention to own her. But in that I was forestalled fore-stalled by your friend Cruger." Slade smiled at the sharpened note in the other's voice. "You have to scramble for 'em, nowadays," observed Cruger's bush-hawk bush-hawk partner. "So I am learning," announced the swan-seeker. He said it casually. casu-ally. But some newer timbre in the speaker's voice made Slade think of a gun pit smothered in tree branches. The brief northern night was at its darkest when Cassidy, newly made watchman for Norland Airways, Air-ways, shut off the radio. He sighed as he reached for his thermos at the end of the deal table and drained it of its last cupful of coffee. Then, lighting his pipe, he stepped out into the open and blinked about through the darkness. He wished he could be having a second thermos of coffee. But there was no bright-lighted eating room in that third-rate outfit on the edge of Nowhere. Its air lanes were as short of ships as its administration building was short of paint All it was, in faith, was a rough-and-ready jumping-off place for a lot of lunatics luna-tics who wanted to dig holes in a wilderness where the frost went deeper than the gold. It could never nev-er be classed with those high-toned airports he'd heard many a far-traveled far-traveled pilot talking about No, Cassidy .decided as he made his rounds, this was a melancholy place for a man of spirit. He didn't like the quietness of the hangar where trie twin-motored Grumman amphibian stood surrounded by the engine entrails the workmen had left scattered about. He was glad to move down to the dock edge, where there was a little sound of water-riffles water-riffles against the floats of the Post-craft Post-craft that would be going out in three hours' time. Beside it, the only remaining ship in the harbor, loomed the new Lockheed that looked more like the ghost of a plane, in the uncertain starlight than a workaday framework of metal met-al and linen well covered with elu-minum elu-minum paint. It startled him, as he stood watching watch-ing it that anything so quiet could give birth to movement But as he watched he saw a shadow detach itself from the shadowy fuselage. He saw that shadow drop to the near-by float, and then leap, quick-footed, to the dock edge, (TO BE CONTINUED) |