On the other hand she had never been quite so happy in her life as she was on realizing that she had helped them in a big way by bringing the quinine from America and that she could serve them still more by contacting their relatives and friends in America, when she got back.
“If I do get back,” she whispered. Watching Scottie down those Jap fighters who so richly deserved to die, she had realized as never before how easy it was for a life, just any life, her life, to go out like a match in a high wind.
“But my life must not go out yet,” she told herself, almost fiercely. “I have so much to do—”
She thought again of the messages she was carrying to America, and, strangely enough, of the roll of papyrus. She could not but feel that this roll was somehow very important.
Most important of all was the cargo. “It must go through!” she told herself. “We’ve only a little farther to go.”
After dinner that night she had sat on a log beside the stout-hearted Hop Sing. He had told her how his people had suffered through all those long years, of the speechless cruelties of the Japs, of homes destroyed, women and children reduced to slavery, and all the rest. And now help was coming—not enough yet—but more and more help.
What was the cargo they carried? Once again this question came up to intrigue but not to disturb her. Neither she nor Sparky had tried hard to guess the answer. “We shall know,” she assured herself. “It won’t be long now.”
Why were all those bombers heading for China in such haste? Would they help retake Burma and with it the Burma Road? Would they help defend Russia from possible Jap attack? Would they bomb Tokio? She could not guess the answer, but having visited that field hospital, she hoped as never before that they were headed for Tokio.
“And I’d love to go with them,” she told herself.
“But first the mountains,” she whispered. Scottie had told her of the pass, how during the monsoon period great storms went roaring up the sides of those highest mountains of the world.