“But, Nick, we gotta do it.”
Five or six times during old Beth’s recital, Jack Singer, mechanic and relief pilot, had reiterated this. In the back of young Singer’s mind was the thought of his wife, Nellie. She was camping with friends in the Priest Lake vicinity. Last year there had been a bad fire there, too. Supposing Nellie were trapped? Jack kept thinking of that.
“We gotta do it,” he affirmed, impatiently.
“Yeh,” agreed Nick at last, reluctantly. “An’ if we crash, it’s curtains for our jobs—if we get out.”
“Them boys must be facin’ hell up there right now,” said Beth. “They can see the blaze for miles. The dinky-engine will come hell-beltin’ down th’ grade through th’ cutover stuff—she might make it if we could only get her started. But th’ dinky’s settin’ on a mile of level track—gotta have that intake fixed ’fore they could fire ’er.”
“Who’d you think set the fires?” asked Nick, his gray eyes glinting.
“You sort o’ put a crimp in Hinton’s monopoly by gettin’ the rail right o’ way ’cross his cutover land an’ runnin’ logs to the lake, didn’t you?”
“Hinton wouldn’t murder my boys,” said Beth. “He’s my enemy, not theirs.”
“Let’s go,” said the older pilot. “It’s a chance. We’ll fly around an’ volplane down over the mountain top. There ain’t ozone enough in the draft over that fire to keep the motor turnin’.”