“That’s rich! And Pollzoff went off in your plane; flying right into the arms of the police looking for you. Wish I could see the performance.”
“I don’t believe she will do anything so stupid as fly into anyone’s arms, but just the same, they can find out where Nike goes, that is, if the thing works. Now, tell me, what are you doing here?”
“Sort of a prisoner myself,” he answered.
“In a way, yes. I was one of the war air-kids, and after that didn’t want to do anything but fly, but the woods were full of fellows trying to do the same thing and the jobs were almost as few and far apart as hen’s teeth. Well, I grubbed around like a ground-hog at a desk I finally landed until I saved enough money to buy a plane.”
“That was before Col. Lindbergh made the air a place for Americans to fly in and while I hopped about, here, there and several other places I wasn’t exactly a bright and shining success. Then one day I answered an advertisement I read in a middle west paper and took off on a job that seemed too good to be true. As they told me I would be working for a chain of business firms, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker, with the pole and reel thrown in, and didn’t think anything of it when I carried males and females all over the map. I figured they were members of boards, big business stuff with headquarters scattered.” He paused again and frowned.
“I’d been with them a year, and had a real roll in the bank before I made my first trip to Alaska with any of them. It was six months after that before I went over to the Pribilof Islands--”
“Yes, but not the main ones. They are a bit further south, but these little fellows I guess are all on the same range, like an underseas chain of mountains,” he answered, then went on. “I carried mail, supplies and stuff back and forth between them and the mainland, sometimes down to the Aleutian Islands. The Indian woman you call Nomie is an Aleut.”
“That’s what she is. Her husband was a seal fisher and got killed when the kid was little. They had the dugout and lived where you’re being held so she stayed and worked for the gang, she nurses them when they get sick, and all that sort of thing.”
“She’s been mighty nice to me,” Roberta said quickly.