PAGE SIX
STRAIT
GATE
By BOTH
COMFORT MITCHELL
C*pyrt*kt
D. Applet**—Ceitwy C*-, lac.
WNU Servfca
CHAPTER XIII
Gunnar Thorwald was pacing the
corridor when Duncan Van Doren
got out of the elevator. Duncan’s
head was down; he did not see the
flier. Gunnar stared incredulously,
striding toward him. thrusting out
an arm to block his way.
“You have seen her?” There was
an emphasis on the first pronoun
which made the question at once
a demand and a protest.
Duncan looked at him with swim
ming eyes, nodding, his face con
vulsed. He manifested no resent
ment, no conviction that before him
stood the cause of the tragedy; only
an engulfing flood of sympathy and
sorrow. He gulped, groping for his
handkerchief —“Horrible—cruel —”
Gunnar pushed past him toward
the elevator, but It rose as he
reached it, so he turned and went
leaping up the stairs. A woman with
a big bouquet of garden flowers
shrank out of his way.
“Mercy!” she said to her hus
band. "That fellow looks like a
mental case!”
He flung himself through the door
in spite of the card in the brass
frame which read:
Dana
Drs. Dunn and Bixford
NO VISITORS
but he stood still on the threshold,
staring.
Mrs. Dana, standing at the win
dow, he” back to him, turned at
the sound of his entrance. “Please
leave the room!” she said in an an
gry whisper. “No callers are per
mitted. My daughter is—”
Gunnar was not listening. There
was nothing she could tell him about
her daughter. He continued to stand
still, looking at her.
“Leave this room instantly! I will
ring for an orderly to put you out!”
Mrs. Dana cried wildly. "Haven’t
you done enough? Aren’t you satis
fied with the suffering, the agony—”
she was bear'ng down on him in
soft fury. “Do you want to kill
her?”
But Gunnar had reached the bed.
He had leaned over Sarah Lynn,
shaking, and said her name.
She was as nearly white as the
olive and amber and ivory of her
skin could be, and her nose, her
brow, her chin, her cheek-bones
were as sharp and salient as if they
had been chiseled from marble. Her
eyes flew open, bigger and darker
than ever, sunk in shadowed hol
lows, and a startled recognition
came Into them at once and a blaz
ing joy.
"My heart!” Gunnar said hoarse
ly. “My dearest heart!” He could
not have known what he looked like,
but he remembered to smile at her.
Mrs. Dana came and pulled at his
arm but he shook her off and bent
lower, still smiling. “My heart—”
Sarah Lynn’s eyes widened, the
pupils distending, and a strange
look of fright and something stran
ger still came into them. “No!” she
cried. “Go away! Please, please
go away!"
Mrs. Dana was pressing the but
ton. "Now, do you hear?” she tri
umphed. “Do you hear?” *
Gunnar thought it was delirium.
He said gently, “It is Gunnar, my
dearest one—to stay with you al
ways!” He bent to kiss her.
But Sarah Lynn, pinioned and
helpless, able to move nothing but
her eyes, nevertheless, with every
fiber of her being repelled him.
“No, no! Go away! Never come
again—never—come again!”
The press played it up and the
radio buzzed with bulletins about
Gunnar Thorwald’s return flight
■cross the Atlantic, but no news
papers came into Sarah Lynn’s hos
pital room, and they never tuned in
for news flashes —only for music or
comedy programs, or an occasonal
playlet which was known to be
pleasant and amusing.
Gunnar’s name was not men
tioned after the day of his visit.
When, at length, he had been com
pelled to leave the room, he could
hear Sarah Lynn’s voice, spent
but shrill, saying to her mother,
“Make him go away! Make him go
away!”
He had not waited to hear her
mother’s answer, hovering over her
in an agony of protective tender
ness, and he did not know that
Sarah Lynn had cried, quietly,
ceaselessly, for three days. The
tears trickled out of the corners of
her eyes and slid down her temples
into her hair, and she could not lift
her hand to wipe them away.
Her doctors and nurses were dis
turbed, but they didn’t seem able to
control it. “This isn’t helping any,”
Miss Burke said.
"It is just the reaction, the great
relief, after that distressing and
cruel interview the other day,” Mrs.
Dana insisted. “Darling, you are
safe with Mother, and no one is go
ing to bother you again! Mother’s
right here!” She saw the nurse’s
cool gray eyes upon her and fol
lowed her out into the aggressively
clean-smelling corridor. "It is per
fectly natural,” she said rather
combatively. “She regards him as
the cause of her misfortune, so of
course she shrinks from him.”
“You think so?” Miss Burke said
levelly. “Well, I can’t give all the
answers, but that wouldn’t be my
diagnosis." She went away with her
noiseless, heelless tread. She was
glad she was going on her vaca
tion; she hated to have cases get
her as this one did.
Sarah Lynn persistently asked for
the old family doctor from Los Ga
tos and they were obliged to send
for him. He could contribute noth
ing, they felt sure, but if it was a
comfort to the child—
" Suppose you just step out and
let us have our visit alone,” he
said mildly. Then he sat down and
patted her hand. “Well, Sarah
Lynn, I brought you into the world,
as the old saying goes, and I saw
you tnrough measles and chicken
pox and the rest of’em. I’m mighty
sorry about this. Was there any
thing special you wanted to .say to
me?”
She could not turn her head, but
her eyes turned to him. “You tell
the truth, always. Am I going to
die?”
“No,” he said heartily. “I’m not
up on all the details of your case,
of course, but I had a talk with
Dunn. No, there's no doubt about
it, Sarah Lynn; you’re going to
live.”
“Must I?”
He cleared his throat. “I guess
you must. girl. I guess that’s your
chore.”
Sarah Lynn said after a long
pause, “I know doctors can’t —kill
people. It’s only animals that can
be —what do they say?—‘put out of
their misery.’ But can’t they—just
not make people live?”
He shook his grizzled head.
"That’s their chore, Sarah Lynn,
making people live.” Then he said
briskly. “But it’s not going to be
like this, you know, always.”
Sarah Lynn said, “They used to
give me stuff all the time to make
me sleep. I wish they still did. If
I have to live, I think they might
do that for me."
“Pain still bad?"
"Not my back . . . my head, my
heart. Will you ask them to give
it to me again?”
“No,” the old country, doctor said.
“I won’t do that, Sarah Lynn. You
wouldn’t want me to. I guess it
took plenty of grit to go up in your
plane, and more than plenty to
come down in a parachute. But I
believe you have a lot of grit left.”
He stood up, looking down at her,
his eyes very bright. “Yes, you’ve
got to live, Sarah Lynn.”
Conrad Jordan was Gunnar’s only
defender. All Danavale condemned
him hotly. The elders considered it
a blessing that he had gone—his
presence, they understood from her
mother, was only a torment to the
poor child—but certainly he had act
ed most shabbily.
“What a heel!” Sarah Lynn’s
young brother said. “Gosh —what a
heel!”
Because of his defection, because
he was the alien, the intruder in
the dan. Danavale had convinced
THE ZEBULON RECORD
itself thfct Gunnar Thorwald was,
indirectly, the reason for Sarah
Lynn’s tragic accident
Lynn Dana and Conrad Jordan
agreed to cease discussing it The
flier stood loyally by the ace.
“I don’t see what else the boy
could do, Lynn. She turned from
him—she shrank from him—in hor
ror. She begged him to go away
forever; she told him repeatedly
Ui}iliiiiiiim»i | »ninif
She begged him to go
away forever.
that she never wanted to see him
again.”
“But—in her condition —”
“No; she was not under opiates;
she was absolutely clear. Upon my
word, I don’t see how he could have
acted otherwise.”
Conrad Jordan went back to Ta
hoe to close his lodge for the win
ter. The man in the wheeled-chair
wrote to his traveling cousin:
“I cannot help feeling that Gun
nar acted ignobly. And yet—what
could he accomplish by staying?
If Sarah Lynn is to be helpless,
what, after all, would they have in
common? It was, we must in jus
tice remember, a plant of hasty
growth: not deeply rooted, I dare
say. Flying brought them togeth
er. But now—even without her in
jury, I doubt if he could have fitted
himself into our scene; eagles don’t
make barnyard fowls.
“They are bringing her home
from the hospital in a few days.
Her mother has turned over her
own sitting-room to Sarah Lynn.
Duncan Van Doren is a pattern of
devotion, they tell me—constantly
there, reading aloud, always on the
job. Well, perhaps it helps a lit
tle; the test comes later, when they
know whether she has a chance of
more than partial recovery.”
The typewriter was silent while he
looked up at the pipe-rack above his
fireplace, done in painstaking pyrog
raphy with unconvincing poppies
painted in, and below, in rather
wobbly letters, the verse:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments
the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The girl who had made that for
him, the golden-curled, violet-eyed,
mother-of : pearl maiden who had
sobbed that she would sit beside his
chair all the long days of her life,
had not been put to the test. If she
had not died— He wondered. It
was a fragrant memory.
Mrs. Edwin Dana’s upstairs sit
ting-room had always been a place
of cozy cheer, but now it fairly radi
ated and exuded joyous serenity.
People came into the room with ris
ing inflections, stepping lightly on
the balls of their feet. They some
times paused outside the door to
arrange their smiles.
Miss Pennington sat there with
her sewing, and young Bill racketed
in on his return from school, and
her father and the older brothers
came for brisk and breezy chats
before or after their dinner.
Her mother and Duncan, one or
the other, were always there. «
“Did you ever see such devo
tion?” people asked, almost revel*
ently. “If Cousin Adelaide isn’t the
very essence of self - sacrificing
mother-love! And Duncan, well, if
evgr a fellow deserved a reward —”
His? Dana WebSfit told liar hus
band, “I loathe having to admit it.
because I never could see him with
a binocular, but Duncan is certainly
a wonder about this. Honestly, he
is. I never gave him credit for
really caring, tremendously; I
thought the whole affair had been
motivated by the mothers. But he
must care, Neddy.”
Her husband turned a lathered
face. “Probably does, poor kid.”
"Os course, I think he’s getting a
great kick out of his own nobility.
No, really— l don’t say that cattily.
It doesn't detract from his credit
But I do think he dramatizes him
self—Gunnar Thorwald, Norwegian
ace, heartlessly flying home, desert
ing his helpless, paralyzed sweet
heart; Duncan Van Doren standing
by. Well, that’s natural enough. And
as for Cousin Adelaide, actually,
she gets more beautiful by the hour,
and I don't believe she was ever
happier in her life.”
"Oh, come, now,” he reached for
his shaving lotion. “That’s pretty
thick, old gal! After all her grief
and shock and—”
She stood her ground. "I can un
derstand it. Cousin Adelaide is one
of those born-to-commanders, and
for the first time Sarah Lynn is
obeying. Even as a baby, she wrig
gled away, and was a contrary
child, and she wouldn’t make a
proper debut, and she wouldn’t be
engaged to Duncan Van Doren. And
then she would fly, and she would
marry a strange foreign flier. Now
her mother’s got her, utterly. She’s
just as much in a cage as those
jittery canaries. She broods over
her and feeds her like a baby bird
in a nest.”
To her husband’s bewilderment
she burst into angry tears.
(Continued next week)
THINGS TO WATCH FOR
Porous rubber whisk-brooms
•which picks up lint, fluff particles
and dust specks and is easily clean
ed by squeezing it in soapy water.
. . . . A sleep kit, containing a
light-shield and ear plugs—for in
somnia sufferers. . . “Piano Christ
mas Clubs” —for families who
want to save during the year for a
piano at Yueltide. . . New method
of sending facsimile telegrams so
simple that a child can operate it;
sender writes message on blank in
black ink or pencil and drops it in
slot and the message is automatic
ally received in the main telegraph
office.
It is authoritatively stated that
the price of an average movie tic
ket in the United States includes
41 Federal taxes.
Why Suffer Longer Than NnoeeaaryTf
Dr. Miles Anti-Pain Pills Relieve Quickly
DR. MILES ANTI - PAIN put you back on your feet
PILLS were made for just one again “rarin’ to go”,
purpose—to relieve pain. Users DR MILES ANTI - PAIN
write that they “work like PILLS act quickly. Yoit don’t
magic”. They contain an es- to wait forty minutes to
fective, quick-acting, analgesic an . °V r or t^ie ™ to ta^e effect
-pain reliever. 111, T U
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riUI/rV 1 | I LDiWinw »
NORTE CAROLINA,
WAKE COUNTY,
IN THE SUPERIOR COURT
Thelma L. Brauer, Plaintiff
A. H. Brauer, Defendant.
NOTICE SERVING SUMMONS
BY PUBLICATION
The defendant A. H. Brauer will
take notice that an action entitled
aa above has been commenced in
the Superior Court of Wake Coun
ty, N. C. to obtain an absolute di
vorce and the said defendant will
further take notice that he is re
quired to appear in the office of
the Clerk of Superior Court of said
county in the courthouse in Ral
eigh, N. C. within thirty days after
4th day of March, 1939 and answer
or demur to the complaint in said
action, or the plaintiff will apply
to the court for the relief demanded
in said complaint.
This 6th day of Feb., 1939.
W. H. SAWYER,
Clerk of Superior Court, .
Wake County,
Mar 3 North Carolina
£££ SALVE
ODD cOLDS
Liquid, Tablets P ri <**
10c & 25c
LOOK!
Dynamite, Caps, Hulls, Fuse,
Meal, Lime, Hay, Fertilizer, Peas
and Beans.
A. G. KEMP Zebulon, N. C.
WILL PAY STRAIGHT SAL
ARY $35.00 per week, man or
woman with auto, sell Egg Pro
ducer to Farmers. Eureka Mfg.
Co., East St. Louis, 111.
LOST OR BORROWED
Step-ladder—Gone for more
than two years
Wheelbarrow—Disappeared in
1938.
Post-hole Digger—Disappeared
early in 1938.
Return of these implements will
be greatly appreciated. All are
needed by the owner.
THEO. B. DAVIS