north to south, and all the way back again. Sometimes these planes were transport planes or bombers with comfortable, heated cabins. More often they were open-seated trainers or fighters. She flew them in wind, rain, and snow. Mile after weary mile in lonely solitude she had gone roaring through the night sky to arrive at last at her destination only to be ushered aboard an airways plane and hurried back again.

“It was hard,” she said to Janet Janes, her companion.

“Sure it was,” the other girl agreed. “Looks as if this would be harder.”

“Perhaps,” Mary answered. “But just think! In the past two days it’s been San Francisco to Denver, to Chicago, to Miami!”

“To Caracas, and then to the heart of a jungle where headhunters beat on hollow logs inviting their friends to a feast.” Janet laughed in spite of herself.

“This will be just a pause,” Mary insisted stoutly. “After that it will be Para, to Dakar in Africa, Dakar to Egypt and the pyramids, Egypt to Persia—”

“Under the Persian moon,” Janet sang softly.

And then:

“Watch!” Mary exclaimed. “There’s the clearing. Sparky has spotted it. He’s preparing to circle. He’s going down!”

Suddenly Mary set her motors thundering. After climbing steeply she leveled off to stare down at the clearing.

“He didn’t go down, not yet,” Janet informed her.

“No. There are people running from that row of native huts. He’d hit them.”

“They’re like ants coming from an ant hill. They don’t seem important.”

“Oh! But they are!” Mary exclaimed. “Every human life is important. Besides, if Sparky killed just one of them, our lives wouldn’t be worth a penny. We’re in the wilds.”

“Probably not a white man within a hundred miles.”

“Or perhaps a thousand.”

“I wish we might go on.” A suggestion of strain crept into Janet’s voice.

“Oh! But we can’t.” Mary’s plane was circling slowly now.

 Prev. P 4/132 next