She paused in the doorless doorway. "May I come in?"
Andy Stevanic looked as if she'd called for him to come quick. "Miss Bennett! Is— is—"
"I'm beginning to think they may be false pains, Andy," she told him, "so relax."
His grin was sheepish. "I'm sorry, Miss Bennett. It's just that—that I've never had a baby before and—and— you know," he finished lamely.
Nobody laughed at him, and Sarah said kindly, "I know, Andy." She looked around. "My goodness. You two have been busy."
A fire was roaring up the mud-and-rock chimney and even without a door or window the cabin was beginning to feel almost comfortable. The dirt floor, which had been churned up by the burrowing of countless voles, had been tramped down until it was almost as hard-packed as the floor in the other cabin had become, and the litter that had accumulated with the years was nowhere in sight.
Watching her inspection, Al Malcolm said with a grin, "You should have seen us. We evicted a couple of dozen voles and a hawk owl with designs on same, I suspect."
"I still say you should have wrung its neck," George Jefferson, who was backed up to the fire, said. "McDavie should have been back."
Sarah saw the concern sprint into Al's face. "I know," he said.
"As Mrs. Emlyn would say, I hope he's not fool enough to leave the valley. Not alone."
"He's hungry."
And he knows everyone else is, Sarah thought. She said, "You'd better get back to bed, Mr. Jefferson."
"Why can't we bring my bed over here now?"
Sarah shook her head. "Not until there's a door and that window is covered. You can't take cold."
He followed her outside, walking slowly and bent forward, one hand pressing as if in support against his right lower abdomen. He shouldn't be walking at all, Sarah thought. Not through this snow. He'd simply have to stay in bed, with that ice pack, Jan-Doreen or no Jan-Doreen.
After all, there were worse things than listening to a laboring woman's moans and Jan-Doreen having no privacy when she needed it most. A perforated appendix— here—was one of them…
A few minutes later Mr. Jefferson was back in bed, the ice pack in place and refilled from the stack of ice chunks one of the other men had brought this morning from the quiet cove along the river, and the thermometer under his tongue.
"I can't neglect you, Mr. Jefferson," she told him smilingly and was answered by what Jan-Doreen called his "thermometer mutter."
She found a pulse in his pudgy wrist and, eyes on her watch, counted.
Normal.
His temperature wasn't but it was down a tenth, to an even hundred and one.
"Well, well!" she exclaimed, pleased. "You're down. A hundred and one."
"Wait till I tell that to Doc Alexander!"
Sarah smiled. She wished he was telling it to Dr. Alexander this minute, but she didn't say so. She would relax when George Jefferson was safe in a hospital, or at least, where a doctor could reach him in a hurry— She looked around when the door opened, half expecting to see Mac McDavie with a handful of ptarmigan, but it was Andy Stevanic and Al.
"We're ready to start door-making," Al said.
"The leather bag on top is mine," George Jefferson told him. "Start with it. The other one is Elder's. I don't know about using it."
The co-pilot eyed Herman Thornton Elder's expensive pigskin bag, a large one—Sarah remembered how funny little Mr. Elder had looked struggling to the plane with it—calculatingly. "I'll take the responsibility. We need that door too bad to go by the rules."
His pocket knife made short work of the lock; in moments the bag lay open before them. Another suit, brown, identical to the one he had worn on the plane. Shirts. Socks. Underwear. Shaving things. Carefully Al lifted them from the bag, handed them to Sarah.
Poor Mr. Elder, she thought, placing them in a corner, out of the way. He was so terrified—
"Heyyyy?" Al's questioning ejaculation caught her in mid-thought. "What's this?"
He was holding a small notebook, which had fallen open in his hand.
"Looks like an installation of some kind. Sketches—Andy," as he passed the notebook to the younger man, "what does that make you think of?"
Andy Stevanic's face was grim. "I know what they are," he said, tight-voiced. "It's the layout for the new missile-launching area."
Chapter 9
"Snow's letting up."
John Norstead's voice was scarcely more than a whisper. Paul Fergis nodded that he'd noticed the slackening too. They weren't talking much—they had little more than the strength to drag themselves forward, weary step after weary step.
It was a question how long they could continue to do that, Fergis thought. If only that hunter—
Grimly he shook off the "if." They had shouted themselves hoarse and had waited, for hours, it had seemed, until it became apparent the hunter was not going to follow the caribou's blood-stained trail.
Yesterday, Paul thought. It didn't seem possible it had been only yesterday. It seemed a week—a month— since they'd left Al and Sarah and the passengers in that cabin… at least they had a gun, with luck Al or Jefferson could pick off a snowshoe.
If only this damned snow would stop. If only they dared stop… sleep, eat—
He felt only weakness now, not the gnawing hunger that had clawed at his stomach again this morning.
That was the trouble. The weakness. The hunger, and the exposure, which was worse, if anything could be, than the terrible emptiness that had followed those shots yesterday.
He tried not to think of it, tried to think of Mrs. Stevanic, of Jenny, who would be frantic with worry… he had to keep thinking about them… keep going on—
He didn't know what it was that first told him Norstead no longer was behind him.
That damned silence, he supposed—the emptiness-emptier than ever because, now, there was only him—
"John!"
The shout was a croak.
"John Norstead!"
There was no answer. He started back, fighting his way along his own trail.
He had to find Norstead!
Had to!
A broken leg, even exhaustion—damn it, a man could freeze to death in a hurry in these mountains—
The thought touched a wellspring of strength he hadn't known still existed within him. He could feel the sudden power of it flowing through his veins, driving into his legs and arms, pulsing in his throat.
"John Norstead!"
New strength was in his voice too. He could hear it bouncing off the mountains, "John Norstead! John Norstead! John Norstead!" in varying degrees of echoing distortion.
"John—"
He found him, a hundred feet back along the trail, slumped down against a snow-covered rock as if he'd fallen asleep.
Paul shook him. "John!"
"Rest."
It was a mumble, barely audible.
"You—go on—I'll—catch up."
Shaking him again, Paul said, "Get up, John! Do you hear me? We've got to keep going, or build a fire—"
And his lighter was acting up, low on fluid, probably —he couldn't remember when he'd filled it last—
"There's no jack pine here. We've got to go on till we find some. Come on. I'll give you a hand up."
After several tries they made it. Norstead was a big man, and strong as a bull caribou, but the long exposure had taken its toll. It had taken heavy toll of both of them, Paul Fergis realized as his new-found strength deserted him and they stumbled drunkenly through the snow.
Damn! They'd better find that jack pine in a hurry—
"Come 'ere?"
The soft clucking questioning sound was near by, almost at the water's edge, it seemed.
Hearing it, Paul started. Could it be?
It could—there it was again!
"Come 'ere? Come 'ere?"
"Hear that, Norstead? Don't move."
He steadied the stumbling, shaking man and then crept forward, afraid to breathe, almost. A
willow ptarmigan could be a skittish bird, and white now for winter it would be hard as hell to see… Another gentle "Come 'ere?" guiding him, he eased his weariness-clumsy legs through some brush and low rocks.
He almost didn't see the ptarmigan in time, and then he almost didn't get it. The bird gave a startled, querulous, "Come 'ere!" Paul felt his fingers brush feathers, grabbed again, wildly, and grasped a scaly, feathery leg—
Scrambling back to John Norstead he cried, "Let's find that jack pine, John! Before we eat him raw!"
Jeez, Fletch Minsen thought, closing the radio shack's door on the unmarked snow that covered the airstrip. Fourteen inches, if she was an inch. He'd have to get out the plow and get 'er cleared off before one of them search planes needed to land.
Shifting his Day's Work to the other cheek he crossed to the small battery-powered radio that, these days, he kept tuned to the Fairbanks station even when he was operating the short-wave set at his elbow.
Ward Barthey's voice fairly leaped into the shack: "—colder, with clearing skies tomorrow. Now for the news."
"Alaska's first major blizzard of the season this afternoon released its stranglehold on the search for survivors of two separate airplane crashes in rugged mountain country to the east of Fairbanks."
"One of the planes, a twin-engine Alaska Passenger and Freight Airways craft piloted by APF owner Paul Fergis, still is missing. The plane, with thirteen persons including its crew of three, disappeared on Tuesday while on its regular flight from Fairbanks to Juneau."
"The plane last was heard from twenty minutes after taking off from Killmoose airstrip, a tiny, isolated landing field on the north fork of Forty-Mile River, near Glacier Mountain, when co-pilot Alistair Malcolm of Fairbanks and Hyannis, Massachusetts, radioed the plane was flying at nine thousand feet in a driving rainstorm."
"Jeez," Fletch Minsen muttered at the radio. The way Barthey was summing up you'd think it was all cut and dried and he expected any minute now for one of them search planes to radio he'd spotted Fergis's plane wrapped around a mountain like it was a telephone pole in Macon, Georgia.
Trouble was, he reminded himself, one of them might, and holy Jeez—
"Among the passengers were three unidentified men who boarded the plane at Killmoose and bought tickets for Juneau. Fletcher Minsen, radio operator at the airstrip, described one of the men, apparently spokesman for the trio, as having a stiff shoulder which he carried higher than the other, and another, a younger man, as having, quote, the deadest looking eyes I ever saw, unquote."
"Although authorities have discounted the possibility that the three men, who, Minsen said, and again I quote, came out of nowhere, unquote, after the APF plane landed at the airstrip, may be the same three who are being sought for attempted sabotage at one of the United States' Distant Early Warning stations late last week, it was established this afternoon that the light plane found burned some fifty miles to the north of Killmoose is the plane which was stolen last Friday in Barrow."
"This reporter and Luke Jasper, of Barrow, owner of the stolen plane, flew to the site of the wreckage this afternoon via helicopter. Jasper definitely identified the plane as the Cessna which was taken from his private hangar within a few minutes after a stranger drew him into a discussion of winter flying conditions in the area. The man, whom he described as, quote, a big man, maybe forty-five, with one shoulder carried, higher than the other, unquote, told Jasper he was a businessman lately come to Barrow and that he was contemplating buying a plane."
"He talked with the man for several minutes, Jasper said, and then went about his business, away from the hangar. When he returned the plane was gone. Jasper did not see the other two men, he said, although he was told three men were in the plane when it took off."
"The pilot from Eilsen Air Force Base who sighted the plane early Tuesday while on a routine flight has not been available for comment since authorities clamped a tight security label on the sabotage attempt, but earlier he reported buzzing the area without seeing any signs of life."
"Today it was learned that the plane apparently made a safe landing, a fact attested to by its landing gear, which was intact. Also, it would appear that the fire, which destroyed a portion of the cabin and one wing, had been set, presumably to make it appear that the plane had burned after crashing."
"However, the fire burned itself out, or possibly was extinguished by rain before it reached the gasoline tank, which registered on the verge of empty."
"Rain was reported on Saturday in Flume Creek, in the same general area."
"In the meantime—"
Feeling as he had when that guy's dead man's eyes had pinioned him briefly, a curling up and dying sort of feeling in the guts, Fletch Minsen turned off the radio. In the meantime. There was hard finality about the words and all of a sudden, for perhaps the first time, Fletch Minsen found himself missing Mac McDavie.
If it wasn't for that damn woman in Copper Creek— Because that didn't help either, he jerked his nail-keg stool handier to the short-wave set and within seconds was listening to Lee O'Kinnelley telling a pilot coming in at Tanacross, "Wind variable, getting around to the north, northeast at eleven, gusts to thirty." Jeez! If only that was Fergis—
"You're doing fine, Jan-Doreen!" Sarah said, straightening. "Just try to relax, and don't worry."
"I'm an awful coward, Sarah."
The girl's whisper was thin, frightened, now that Andy wasn't here to hear it.
Sarah gave one of the slender legs, so incongruous with the swollen, pregnant body, an understanding pat. Jan-Doreen's actual labor had begun several hours ago, shortly after Mac McDavie had returned to the cabin, exhausted but half-carrying half-dragging one of those big, white, graceful-horned sheep that are found in Alaska's mountains. So far everything was going well, if slowly. The pains remained far apart and more irregular than Sarah thought they should be after so long; but then, she told herself, Mr. Jefferson had been right when he'd said a while ago, when Jan-Doreen had been dozing between pains, "First babies don't come easy." She was glad Jan-Doreen hadn't heard him say it, though, she thought. The poor child was scared stiff anyway, and the more tense she became— Sarah put the twinge of concern from her. There was no need for it, she kept telling herself. Everything was going to be all right. Jan-Doreen had had a normal pregnancy. The medical record her doctor in Fairbanks had given her for reference by her family's doctor in Vincennes, Indiana, showed no indication of any abnormalities whatsoever.
Aware of Jan-Doreen's eyes upon her, Sarah smiled. "That doctor of yours in Vincennes is due for a surprise!"
Some of Jan-Doreen's old spirit returned. "He's not the only one! Darn it, Sarah, I had plans."
Sarah laughed. "So has Andrea."
"Bless her," Jan-Doreen said, patting her abdomen. She drew a deep breath and asked, "How long will it be, Sarah?"
"We'd have to ask Andrea that, I'm afraid. Some babies like more time than others."
The fire, which Andy had built up before going out to join Al at the signal fire they had lighted in the middle of the short, narrow valley, sent long shadows across Jan-Doreen's pale young face.
Jan-Doreen closed her eyes for so many minutes that Sarah was beginning to think she was dozing; then, without opening them, she asked, "Will you—give me— something?"
Sarah said simply, "I need you to help me, Jan-Doreen," although she would if she had to.
If she had to take the baby—could she, without instruments—
"Won't it—hurt—awfully?"
"Yes, Jan-Doreen. But if you bear down when I tell you—if you help—it will be better for Andrea."
It was funny, she thought, the way even she, a nurse to whom, Ralph had reminded her once, such things as birth and illness and dying were supposed to be matter-of-course, thought of the baby as "Andrea." Jan-Doreen's steadfast faith that she would have a girl because Andy wanted a girl must be catching, she was thinking when Jan-Doreen gasped, in a panic, "Sarah!"
"Another
one?"
The girl nodded.
It was a longer pain this time and more intense, Sarah thought as her hand on the girl's abdomen felt the rhythmic contractions of the laboring womb.
Across the room, where she had been resting on one of the chairs Al and Andy Stevanic had improvised by using her Samsonite bags and spruce boughs, Cornelia Emlyn nodded her satisfaction. Her own daughters had been born in an apartment upstairs at the "Home, Sweet Home," while miners reveled below, and "many's the time" she had gone into the long Fairbanks nights to deliver a neighbor woman.
"Fairbanks didn't always have the doctors we've got now, child," she had told Jan-Doreen a while ago when they were talking about Jan-Doreen's obstetrician. "Mercy, I remember once—"
Recalling the conversation, Sarah thought that Jenny was going to love getting Mrs. Emlyn and Jan-Doreen together. She already knew Mrs. Emlyn, of course, and as soon as Jan-Doreen and Andy were back with the baby they'd have to get together. One day when she (Sarah) was on the Fairbanks end of her flight. The thought stirred a pleasant anticipation within her. She, Jenny, Jan-Doreen, Mrs. Emlyn—
"Isn't it funny, Jan-Doreen," she said as the contractions eased and Jan-Doreen's tight-pressed lips relaxed somewhat. "You're from Vincennes, Indiana, I'm from Troy, Ohio—nextdoor neighbors, practically, and we meet on an airplane in Fairbanks, Alaska, of all places!"
They had talked about it before, but it was the only thing that popped into her head.
Jan-Doreen bit her lower lip, but she nodded.
"You stay in Fairbanks long enough, Sarah, and you'll meet people from all sorts of places," Mrs. Emlyn told her.
Sarah smiled. "That's what we say back home about Union Station in Cincinnati. Just stay in it long enough and you'll see everybody you ever knew."
"Whewwww!" Jan-Doreen's low moan was one of relief as the pain subsided. "Andrea, honey, you are being a little rascal."
Her lower lip showed the clear imprint of a tooth, Sarah saw with a stab of pity. And it would get worse before it got better—
She tried not to think of the long night ahead. But thank God for that other cabin! They had spent most of the day getting it ready, lacing torn-apart leather suitcases together with thongs cut from George Jefferson's belt and light rope plaited from strips of clothing to make a door which they hung by using the wooden pegs Mr. Jefferson had whittled. The window opening was covered with the hide, still raw and bleeding but hung with the long, soft, white hair inside, of the big Dall ram that Mac McDavie had spent most of his day stalking through the snow. Mr. Jefferson's spruce-bough-and-door bed had been moved over as soon as a roaring fire had driven the chill from the cabin.
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