“Sure! Sure!” they shouted. “Hope you come this way again!”
“I’ll be seeing you,” she called. Then with a lump in her throat she walked to the plane where the men were just replacing the motor.
Did she see a shadow dart away from the other wing of the plane? It was too dark really to know. “Probably a sneaking old jackal,” she told herself.
“Sparky,” she said as they soared aloft some time later, “I’m going to resign from this job of mine.”
“And then what?” Sparky asked in surprise.
“Then I’m going from place to place in all these lonely spots cheering up the boys.”
“That,” said Sparky, “would be a noble purpose, but just now you’re bound to this big plane and me. And you’ll not leave us for a long time, not till the journey’s end.”
“Not till the journey’s end,” she repeated softly. And how soon would the end come? Who could tell? Perhaps tonight. One never knew. She shuddered a little, then turned her attention to the work of the hour.
That night Mary did not sleep. Sparky had first call on a time for rest and he surely needed it. He told her to call him in two hours.
“But I won’t,” she told herself. “Not if all goes well. Something tells me I won’t sleep if I have the chance.” She found herself haunted by a sense of impending doom. The tall French woman, all in black, and the stately Moslem lady were constantly being blended on the pictured walls of her mind. And after that, with the slow sleepy tread of the desert, came the two little men and their camels. They too seemed part of the same picture, but just how, she could not tell.