One thing pleased her, she was to travel with Bill and Mark in the smaller plane. She liked being with her friends. She was very fond of Speed Samson, the smiling young pilot. She feared and hated Peter Loome.
“I am taking the hunters straight to Anchorage. They seem to be in one grand rush,” Dave Breen, pilot of the large gray plane, said. Then aside to Mary he whispered, “They’re paying me well. Hunt me up in Anchorage and I’ll buy you a hot fudge sundae.” Mary smiled her thanks. They were fine fellows, these pilots, just how fine she was later to learn.
The take-off was exciting. She shuddered as they glided over the ice. An ominous crack-crack-crack sent chills up her spine, yet the ice held. There had been a light snowfall. The snow was sticky, it would not let them go. Round and round the lake they whirled. Louder and louder the motors thundered. Then someone shouted “Up!” and up they went whirling away over the treetops.
Once again the glorious panorama of dark forest, gray crags, winding streams and blankets of snow lay beneath them.
“We’re going home! Home!” Mary shouted in Mark’s ear. Mark nodded soberly. He was listening. Listening for what? Mary knew well enough, for trouble, motor trouble.
“There will be no trouble,” she assured herself. Once again she thought of home. What a place of joy that once deserted valley of the North had become for them. She thought of the worried millions in the cities and scattered over the plain far to the south of them—worried millions wondering where the next week’s food supply was to come from. She thought of their well-lined cupboards, of their cellar bursting with good things to eat, then sighed a sigh of content.
This mood was short-lived. Even she caught and understood the strange shudders that shook the small plane. A moment of this and they went circling downward toward the shining white surface of a small lake. Once again her heart was in her mouth. They had left the higher altitudes where the nights were bitter cold. They were equipped with skis. Would this new lake be frozen hard enough for that? Scarcely time for these few flashing thoughts and bump—they hit the lake. Bump—bump—bump. What glorious bumps those were. They meant one more happy landing.
Dismounting, the girl stared aloft while the large gray plane circled over them. Once, twice, three times it circled through the blue, then, with a sudden burst of speed, like some wild duck that had heard the bang of a hunter’s gun, it sped straight away.
Florence was walking disconsolately back and forth along the pier at Anchorage early that same afternoon. She was deep in her own thoughts. Having gone for a visit to Palmer, she had been invited to come for a stay at Anchorage. Sending a note back to her cousins, she had taken the train for Anchorage.
Strangely enough, Mary had met high adventure, while she was meeting with bitter disappointment. She had so hoped that her lone fifty-dollar bill would somehow carry her to that charmed city of her grandfather, Nome, Alaska.