The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings Part 28

The boy stirred uneasily and his eyes opened.

"Oh, is it you, Peggy? I guess I was knocked out for a minute.

It's my shoulder. Ouch! Don't touch it."

The boy winced as Peggy's soft hand touched the injured member.

"Allow me. I've got a little skill at surgery."'

It was Professor Wandering William's voice, and Peggy caught herself wondering that he didn't make some reference to his infallible bone set or wonder-working liniment. But he didn't. Instead, he knelt by Roy's side, and with a few deft strokes of his knife had cut away the boy's s.h.i.+rt and bared a shoulder that was rapidly turning a deep blue.

Tenderly as a woman might have, Wandering William felt the wound.

"Hurt?" he asked, as Roy winced, biting his lips to keep from crying out under the agony.

"Hurt?" echoed Peggy indignantly; "of course it does."

Professor Wandering William looked up with an odd air of authority in his keen eyes.

"Please fetch me some water from the aeroplane," he said, and Peggy had no choice but to obey.

Professor Wandering William, picking Roy up in his arms as if he were a baby, instead of a 165-pound boy, carried him after her and laid the injured lad out in the scant strip of shade afforded by the aeroplane. Then, with bits of canvas ripped from the cover which had served to conceal him when he entered the aerial vehicle, the strange wanderer skillfully bathed and then bandaged the wound.

"Nothing more than a bad sprain," he announced.

Roy groaned.

"And just as I was going ahead at such tiptop speed, too," he complained. "I won't be able to use this arm for a month the way it feels."

"Never mind, Roy, I can drive the aeroplane," comforted Peggy. But Roy was fretful from pain.

"What can a girl do?" he demanded; "this is a man's work. Oh, it's too bad! It's--"

Suddenly the pain-crazed lad realized what he was saying and broke off abruptly:

"Don't mind me, sis. I'm all worked up, I guess. But if it hadn't been for this delay we'd have beaten them out. And now--"

"And now the first thing to do is to see what ails this old machine," said Professor Wandering William briskly. "Let me lift you into the what-you-may-call-um, my boy, and make you as comfortable as possible on this canvas."

The professor skillfully arranged the canvas from which he had cut the bandages, and making a pillow for Roy out of his own coat, he lifted the lad into the cha.s.sis.

"There now, you'll do," he said, as his ministrations were completed. "And now, young lady, as you know more about this thing than I do let's have a look at it and see what particular brand of illness it is suffering from."

A brief examination showed Peggy that the radiator--the intricate mesh-work of pipes in which the circulating water for cooling the cylinders is kept at a low temperature--was leaking, and that almost all their supply of water had leaked out. This had caused the cylinders of the motor to overheat and had stopped the aeroplane in midair.

"Bad--is it?"'

Professor Wandering William noted the despairing look on Peggy's face as she discovered the cause of the stoppage.

"As bad as bad can be," the girl rejoined seriously; "it means if we can't get water and something to stop that leak with that we can't go on or go back. We're stuck right here."

"Phew!" Wandering William's lips puckered in a whistle. "I should just say that is bad."

He looked about him. On every side stretched the dazzling white alkali, with here and there a little dust devil dancing as if in mockery at their plight.

On all that vast expanse they seemed the only living things, and Wandering William knew the desert well enough to realize that it is not good to linger on its treacherous sands.

CHAPTER XXIII

BUD TO THE RESCUE

"I'm going to look for water!"

Wandering William spoke decisively after an hour or more of futile endeavors to start the motor with the little fluid they could spare from the water kegs. But even without the leaky radiator it would have been an impossibility to cool the cylinders with the small quant.i.ty they were thus able to command.

"Look for water!" Peggy echoed the words blankly.

In all that sun-blistered expanse it seemed to be an impossibility to even dream of discovering a drop of moisture. And they needed buckets full.

Wandering William, perhaps deeming it wise not to strain the over-wrought girl's nerves further by keeping up the conversation, strode off. Apparently he wandered aimlessly, but in reality his keen, trained eyes were on the alert every instant. To the desert traveler the most insignificant signs may betray the presence of the life saving fluid.

Peggy watched the strange figure till it vanished from view over a low rise, for although the desert seems flat on a superficial view, it is, in reality, no more level than the tossing sea. Rises and hollows make its surface undulating.

In the meantime Peggy ministered to Roy as best she could. With a spare bit of canvas she made a shelter to keep off the blazing rays of the sun. Roy thanked her with a smile. The first sharp keen pain of his injury had gone, but he felt weak and dizzy. Presently he begged for a drink of water, and Peggy, not daring to tell him how low the supply was gave it to him. The boy was feverish from his injury, and almost drained the canteen of luke-warm stuff she held to his lips. Then he lay back with a satisfied smile.

"Get the radiator fixed yet?" he asked presently.

Peggy had told him that it would not be long before they were under way again.

"Not yet, Roy dear. But don't worry about that. It will be fixed presently. Suppose you try to go to sleep."

The boy closed his eyes and tried to compose himself to slumber.

Before long he actually did doze off and lay in that state while the long hours dragged slowly by. Wandering William had not reappeared, and Peggy wondered in a dull, vague sort of sort of way if he ever would come back. Perhaps he had deserted them, she thought. But, even this reflection brought no poignant sensation of despair. The girl had sunk into a sort of apathy in which nothing' seemed to matter much. Only she fairly ached with thirst. But Roy would awake presently and want water. The little they had must be saved for him.

And so the hours wore on and the sun marched blazingly across the sky. It was mid-afternoon, and Roy had not awakened, when Peggy was startled from her gloomy thoughts by a loud hail.

"Hul-lo!"

Springing to her feet she looked across the desert. On the summit of a distant earth wave she saw the figure of Wandering William. He was gesticulating frantically and shouting something. He had his hands to his mouth, funnelwise, to make the sound carry better.

What was it he was crying out? It sounded like--yes, it was:

"Water! I've found it! Water!"