Dave Dawson with the Pacific Fleet

by Robert Sidney Bowen

The Colonel grinned and opened his mouth to speak, but what he was about to say never left his lips. At that moment all three of them heard the faint drone of a plane somewhere up in the sky, but out of sight behind the towering mountains north of them. As one man they spun around and stared hard at the dawn light bouncing off the snow-capped peaks. Nobody said a word. Nobody could. They were all too busy holding their breath, and praying as they had never prayed before.

After a few seconds Dave snapped out of his trance, ran over to the pile of deadwood they had collected, grabbed up an armful, ran back to the fire and dumped his load. Then he picked up a can of oil drained from the engine and poured it on the licking flames. A second more and a column of oily black smoke went towering up into the dawn sky.

"He can't miss that, unless he's blind!" Dave muttered through clenched teeth as the black smoke mounted higher and higher. "Come on, whoever you are, take a look, take a look!"

"Steady, Dawson," Colonel Welsh cautioned gently as Dave's voice rose to a wild shout. "We've got to steel ourselves in case he doesn't see it. Then it won't be so tough. This thing might happen several times, you know. No telling. Save your strength, son. Take it easy."

Dave hardly heard the words of wisdom. His eyes were glued to the north, his ears strained to catch every beat of the plane's engine which was still out of sight, and his two fists clenched tight as though he were actually pulling the unseen plane closer and closer. Then, suddenly, the drone of the engine grew louder. It rose to a mighty roar. And then the plane came sailing into view above the mountain peaks. It was a five-place Stinson cabin plane, a commercial plane probably owned by some rancher. There were no markings on the craft other than the usual Bureau of Aeronautics license letter and number. A wild cry of joyous relief struggled up Dave's throat but was unable to pass his lips. A riot of emotions boiled up within him, and his lips and his tongue were suddenly too dry to form sounds. So he simply stood stock still and grinned from ear to ear as the cabin plane cleared the peak and then came nosing down toward them; circling down like some giant bird seeking a spot to light on.

When it was less than five hundred feet over their heads, the three men shook themselves loose from their paralytic spell and started jumping around and waving their arms wildly as though the pilot of the plane hadn't seen them yet. The pilot waggled his wings as a signal that he had, and then leveled off and went coasting toward the eastern end of the landing strip. There he circled back, suddenly fed hop to his engine and started to climb. For one horrible moment Dave was afraid the pilot had decided that he couldn't put his plane down on the small strip. But he was wrong. The pilot had simply goosed his engine to add enough to his speed to clear the tops of some tall trees. He slipped over them, went up on left wing a bit, and slid down to level off in a perfect landing.

Even as the plane was braking to a stop, Dave, Freddy, and the Colonel rushed back to it. They pulled up to a halt, waited for the plane to roll the last few feet, then ducked under the left wing and around to the cabin door. They had already seen that there were two men aboard the plane, the pilot and a passenger. As Dave watched them come back from the pilot's nook to the cabin door, he was faintly surprised by their looks. Why, he didn't know, but somehow he had expected to see a couple of youngsters climb down from the plane. But they weren't young. They were both well along in years. They had hard, rugged faces, covered by at least a two week's growth of whiskers. They wore rough clothing, and each man carried a gun slung at his hip. The guns were not pistols, though. They were automatics, and Dave suddenly had the hunch that their rescuers were a couple of fire rangers, or at least some kind of government men. The way they leaped cat-like out the cabin door and down onto the ground seemed somehow to suggest the military to Dave. But what they were didn't matter in the slightest. They had arrived to rescue them, and that was all that counted.

"Stuck, huh?" the older one of the pair grunted, and grinned. "Lucky we happened to see your smoke signal. You might have camped here for quite a spell. Army and Navy, huh?"

"And in a hurry," Colonel Welsh said. Then, after introducing himself: "We had a forced landing. Er—engine trouble. Can you fly us to the nearest Air Corps Base where we can pick up another plane? I'll see that you're paid for it, of course."

"Guess so," the man grunted after a look at his partner. "But where're you headed? Maybe we could hop you all the way, and save time, if you're in such a hurry."