To Gale, that never ending procession was truly a sight she would never forget. In her mind’s eye she could see them all,—men, trucks, guns and tanks moving into places assigned to them beneath the Secret Forest. “They won’t be there long,” she told herself. “But as long as they remain, with my radar I shall be watching over them. Truly I must be their guardian angel! I must not fail.”
At that moment though her eyes saw shadowy forms moving forward in the night. The inner eyes of her being were seeing boys, bright American boys she had known, and thousands she had seen but never known.
“Those are the boys riding out there tonight,” she told herself. “Riding to battle.” Again she whispered: “I must not fail!” and the words of an old song seemed to sing themselves in her mind: “A charge to keep I have.”
The procession was endless,—guns, tanks, trucks, men, then more guns, tanks, trucks, men.
“No end to it,” Gale whispered, sliding down from her seat. “Come on. We’ve got to get back. Tomorrow I must be there in my hideout helping to keep the Jap bombers away.”
“Pete suggested this trail,” said Isabelle.
“We’ll have to try it.” Gale sighed. “We can’t mingle with tanks and guns, that’s sure.”
So, after snapping on a tiny flashlight, she led the way straight into new and surprising adventure.
The trail the three girls followed was strange. It was not a road. There were no wheel tracks, and yet it was well traveled, trodden down and smooth by years of constant use. Here and there in soft places beside the path they found footprints of horses and donkeys.
“Perhaps this is the trail the colonel and you took down the mountain, Than Shwe,” Isabelle suggested.
“I don’t think it can be,” was the answer. “This is a good trail. Ours was horrible. We lost it more than once because it just vanished into nothing.”
The upward climb was much longer than they had expected it to be. Gale thought that any minute they would find themselves turning sharply to the right, then starting down toward the Secret Forest. They did not turn, but kept straight on up an incline that every moment grew steeper.
Gale was ready to suggest that they give it up and turn back.
“We’re paying too much for our view of the parade,” said Isabelle.
“I wouldn’t have missed it,” said Than Shwe. “For now I know we cannot fail.”
Gale said nothing, but trudged straight on. “Tomorrow is another day,” she was thinking. “And I must be guardian angel for many thousands. I made a mistake by coming, but now we must get back.”
Suddenly they reached the crest of the ridge. “Oh! This is better.” Gale sighed. “Now we’ll follow along the ridge a little way and then start down.”
But there was no trail along the crest of the ridge, only scrub trees and rocks.
“Look.” Isabelle flashed on her light. “The trail goes over the ridge and down on the other side.”
“Wrong direction,” Gale groaned. “If we go that way we’ll never reach our forest, Isabelle. That Pete of yours is some little trail blazer.”
Just then Than Shwe, who had made her way around an immense rock, called softly to them:
“Girls! Come see!”
When they had reached her side they stood staring in amazement, for there beneath them, seeming so close in the moonlight that Gale half fancied she could step on its roof, stood a Buddhist temple surrounded by a high wall.
“So that’s it! That’s the reason for the trail!” Gale exclaimed. “What a strange place for a temple.”
“It is a monastery where Buddhist monks live,” Than Shwe explained. “They are everywhere, these monks. Perhaps there are native villages not too far away, or a trail where people may get lost. They are like your Christian monks in the high Alps.”
“There is always a gate keeper,” she went on. “They may have a trail to the Secret Forest. It is but a little way. We might go down and ask.”
“It’s worth trying,” Gale agreed. And so they took to the trail again.
They had covered two-thirds of the distance when Gale, who was in the lead, came to a sudden halt.
“Look!” she whispered. “A woman.”
She pointed at a window of the temple that could be seen above the wall. There was a light in the room. Through the window they saw a tall woman. She was combing her hair.
“This is not strange,” Than Shwe whispered back. “Everyone is welcome to spend a night in one of these temples. They make a little offering in the morning, or perhaps a very good one if they are rich.”
“But that woman looks familiar.” Gale did not move. Taking a small pair of binoculars from her pocket, she studied the scene, the temple, the window and the woman standing at a crude dressing table.
“This is eavesdropping,” she whispered. “All the same it must be excusable.
“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely ten seconds later, barely avoiding dropping her glasses. “Yes! It surely is.” Then she whispered four startling words:
“The woman in purple!”
“Let me look.” Than Shwe took the glass while they all shrank deeper into the shadows.
Than Shwe studied the woman and her surroundings for some time. When at last she returned the glasses to their owner, she said:
“This is a very bad woman.”
“What? Do you know her?” Gale whispered in surprise.
“Oh yes! For a long time.” Than Shwe shrank still deeper into the shadows.
“She is called Madam Stark, and comes from India, but she lived a long time in Burma. She is very dangerous.”
“But Stark is an English name,” Gale whispered in surprise.
“Yes. She married a very rich English trader. He was not a good man. There are bad men from every land. They say he traded in opium. He treated her badly. That is why she hates all English people.”
“Is she really a spy?” Gale asked.
“This I do not know,” Than Shwe pondered. “Perhaps she may be. Anyway she did great harm in Burma. She paid men to wreck bridges and tear up railway tracks when the British army was coming. She was in China, too. Oh yes! And she was a bad one there! We have a Chinese nurse, Maida, at our hospital here. She knows about her in China. She will tell you plenty.
“But look!”—the little Burmese girl’s whisper changed. “Look. On her dressing table she has a dresser set that seems very strange.”
Putting the glasses once more to her eyes Gale stared in silence for a long time.
“Yes,” she agreed. “That IS a strange collection, stranger than you think, Than Shwe.” She seemed greatly excited.
“Let me look,” Isabelle whispered, naming the articles in the leather case as she looked—“The comb is missing. She is using it; a nail buffer; sharp pointed dagger; nail file; little blue automatic pistol; shoe horn, and—and something else I can’t make out. I’d hate to meet that lady in the dark.”
“And I,” Than Shwe agreed.
“But that ‘something else’ is the most important of all, unless I miss my guess,” Gale put in. “I can’t be quite sure, but I think it’s one of the three secrets of radar.”
“Secrets of radar!” Isabelle whispered.
“Sure, Isabelle. Don’t you know how, after my radar set had been blown up, I looked so long for the three parts that might give our secrets away?”
“Oh yes. You found two of them, but—”
“But the third was gone. It was while I was looking for those parts that I first saw that woman in purple. She too appeared to be looking for something. I always have thought that she found that part. I am almost sure of it now. It would be terrible if she succeeded in getting all three secret parts. The Jap’s radar is a poor one, but with those secrets—”
“They’d be shooting down our planes in the fog and the dark,” said Isabelle.
“That’s what they would. Tell you what!” Gale exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. “I am going down there and demand the right to see the contents of that case!”
“Oh no!” Isabelle whispered. Her eyes were on the dagger and the automatic.
“You will not get inside the walls,” said Than Shwe. “At sundown the gates are locked. They are opened only at sunrise.”
“And there’s a day’s work waiting for each of us!” Isabelle suggested.
“Oh yes! A day’s work!” Gale murmured. “I’ll report this to the colonel or the army intelligence office first thing tomorrow.”
“That makes sense,” Isabelle agreed. “Only you’ll have to leave the reporting to me—your day starts too soon.”
“But what are we to do just now?” Gale sank to a seat.
“We’ll go down and thumb a ride in the giants’ parade,” said Isabelle. “That at least will be an adventure.”
“Thrilling,” Gale agreed. “Well, what are we waiting for?” She prepared to lead on the return march.
They made their way down the ridge in half the time it took to go up. Then again, this time, quite unwillingly they witnessed the colonel’s grand parade.
Fifteen minutes after their arrival the parade came to a halt.
“Come on!” Gale exclaimed, dashing for a truck. “Now’s our chance!” Arrived at the back of the truck, she pulled at a canvas flap. It gave way, letting out a flood of light.
“Hey! What?” a boyish voice began. Then the voice rose: “Jeepers! Girls! Can you tie that!”
“We’re a couple of WACS and a nurse,” Gale grinned. “How about bumming a ride?”
“Sure! Hop in! Crowd over, you fellows. It’s not always we ride with ladies.”
“We’re not exactly ladies,” said Gale when they had found their places and the flap was closed. “We’re soldiers, same as you are, in for the duration. My friend Isabelle here is the colonel’s yeoman, and—”
“What do you know about that!” one of the boys exclaimed. “Think of meeting the colonel’s yeoman!”
“Hey, Isabelle!” another boy exclaimed. “I don’t like this war. Not enough fun. I want to go home. Fix it up with the colonel, will you?” The boys all laughed.
The question required no answer, so Gale went on: “This nurse, Than Shwe, came over the mountains with the colonel on his retreat. Now she’s going back.”
“Leave it to us Than Whatever!” exclaimed a burly redhead. “We’ll cut a wide path for you all the way to China.”
“That’s fine,” the little Burmese girl chimed in. “And if you stub your toe or something, come to my hospital. I’ll fix you up.”
“Say! You’ve been up there ahead!” another boy exclaimed. “What sort of a place is it?”
“Swell,” said Isabelle. “It’s a forest of immense trees and it’s big enough to hide the whole army. But you won’t be there long, and neither will we. We travel with the colonel.”
“And boy! Does he ever travel fast!” exclaimed a boy with a Cumberland Mountain accent.
“While you’re in the Secret Forest I am to be your guardian angel,” said Gale.
“Are you an angel?” someone exclaimed. This called for one more laugh.
“Well, not quite,” Gale replied when the laugh was over. “I sit in a box among the rocks and watch for naughty Jap planes that might bomb you.”
“With a spyglass?” One boy was impressed.
“With radar. That’s lots better,” Gale explained. “I can spot them two hundred miles away. I send in a report and our fighters go out to meet them. We had a grand scrap today.”
“Beat the livin’ daylights out o’ ’em? Huh?” said a voice.
“That’s what we did. It was grand, only—” Gale hesitated. “Only I’m afraid the Japs got one of my friends, Jimmie Nightingale. He was a Flying Tiger.”
“Jimmie Nightingale!” a dark eyed youth exclaimed. “He’s from my home town, and no kidding. He’s one swell guy. But say, sister, if you think any dirty Jap got Jimmie you’ve got one more guess coming, believe me!”
And so amid laughter, vague fears and words of cheer the three girls rode home to their Secret Forest with one little corner of the grandest army the world has ever known.
When at the edge of the forest the truck once again came to a halt, the tired trio tumbled out amid the low cheers of their hosts, and raced away to their tent where they drowned the day’s adventures in a batch of sleep.
And the morrow was another day.
The following morning when just before dawn Gale and Jan wound in and out among the trees of the Secret Forest on their way to work, it seemed as if they were in another world. Where yesterday only moss and ferns could be seen, tents had blossomed in abundance. Beside these stood tanks and trucks.
Here and there they passed sleepy sentries. These saluted them with a wave and a friendly smile.
“They like us!” Jan exclaimed. “Golly! Ain’t that swell!”
“It’s your figure they like,” Gale laughed.
“Yeah—sure,” Jan agreed. “Fine and sturdy.” You couldn’t get Jan’s goat.
Further on they passed a portable kitchen that gave off pungent odors of burning wood, frying ham and brewing coffee.
“Hmm!” Jan sniffed. “Good old Virginia hickory-smoked ham! Let’s stop for breakfast!”
“You’ll have toast, and coffee from a bottle, same as usual,” Gale replied grimly. “This is the most important day of our lives thus far. Think what it would mean if a big formation of enemy bombers flew over and dropped their hate on all this.” She swung her arms wide.
Despite her fears, Gale passed a quiet day in her hideout on the ridge. Twice she thought she had picked up the scent of a wolf-pack of enemy planes coming her way, but both times the scent faded and she knew that her fears were not well founded.
Just at sunset she received a sudden shock. With the skies all clear and no sight of enemies about, she stepped out on the rocky ledge for a breath of air. She had not been there a minute when on a ridge fully half a mile away, she spied a lone figure walking slowly.
“He’s no soldier,” she told herself, lifting binoculars to her eyes. “Some native in a long, black robe,” she decided. “And,” she caught her breath—“he walks as if he were a little lame in both feet.”
At that instant, as if he had caught a flash of light from her glasses, as indeed he might have done, the lone walker quickened his strange, halting steps to disappear behind the ridge.
“It’s strange,” Gale said to Jan a moment later. “Twice before I have seen such a man,—once up there in the temple at the edge of the city.”
“He was the one who locked Isabelle in the room of Absolute Silence and tried to poison you with incense fumes,” Jan suggested.
“That’s what we thought,” Gale said. “Of course, we couldn’t prove it.”
“And the other time he was with the woman in purple,” said Jan.
“That’s right. Can you tie that! Last night it was the woman in purple we saw in a temple! And now it’s the two-legged cripple again!”
“Looks as if they were shadowing us,” said Jan with a shudder. “Gives me the willies.”
“They’ll get shadowed,” Gale declared. “Isabelle probably has set the army intelligence service on them by now.”
“Or the colonel,” said Jan. “He’d be worse.”
An hour later they found themselves once more riding in the shadows of the Secret Forest.
They were met at the tent door by a tremendously excited Isabelle. “Come on!” she exclaimed. “Get cleaned up, quick! You won’t have much time for chow. Here! I brought you a huge can of coffee and I’ve made you some marmalade sandwiches. You’ll just have time to gulp them down and get into your costumes.”
“Costumes!” Jan exclaimed, catching Isabelle’s excitement,—“You mean uniforms, don’t you? Does the big push into Burma really start right now, and are we to go with the army? Oh! Glory be! Yippy!” She was fairly dancing.
“Who said anything about the big push?” Isabelle demanded. “And I don’t mean uniforms. I said costumes, and I mean our barber costumes.”
“Barber costumes! Oh! Good grief!” Gale sat down quite suddenly. “You don’t mean to say you brought those things along!”
“At the colonel’s request,” Isabelle nodded.
“But the colonel!” Jan exploded. “He never saw us do that skit back there at the Club in the city.”
“That’s what you think!” Than Shwe put in. “What the colonel doesn’t see isn’t worth seeing.”
“The colonel slid into a back seat the night of the Club entertainment when we did our Lady Barber Quartette feature,” Isabelle explained. “He liked it, so—”
“So we are to do it for his entire army, I suppose!” Gale did an imitation collapse.
“It’s not really a big army,” Isabelle defended. “I don’t think there are more than twenty thousand. There’s a much larger army striking at the Japs from another direction, and—”
“And that’s the next spot on our barn-storming tour,” Gale exploded.
“I didn’t say that,” Isabelle replied quietly. “Truth is,” she admitted, “I too had my misgivings. Jan is such a clown! She’s—”
“Oh! I am, am I!” Jan exploded. “Just for that I’ll do the skit alone!”
“Indeed you’ll not!” Gale stormed. “There’s got to be a little dignity to our part of the outfit, even if we are a small group.”
“Here, you two.” Than Shwe held out steaming cups of coffee to Jan and Gale. “Drink these and quiet down. You know what the colonel wants he’s going to have. Besides, he brought you three WACS along when it was against the rules, and if you’re not nice little girls he can send you back.”
“That,” Gale agreed after burning her tongue on the coffee, “is the plain unvarnished truth.”
All of which meant that at one of the home talent shows given by army women at the Club for women only back there in India, the four jolly comrades, led by Gale, had dressed up in barber’s coats and slacks, with combs behind their ears, and had put on a Lady Barber Quartette stunt. Jan, who blacked her face and sang as the bootblack of the shop, had nearly stolen the show. It had been quite a success. The colonel had seen and liked it, so there they were, confronted with the prospect of doing their stunt all over again before thousands of khaki-clad boys from the old USA, a breath taking adventure if ever there was one.
“I’d rather go through a bombing,” Gale declared. “But what the colonel wants is what he’s going to get.”
The scene that lay before them when, after coming up a ridge the back way and entering the impromptu dressing-room—an army tent—and then taking their places on a board platform backed by a sounding-board, was one they would not soon forget. The platform had been erected on a broad rock facing a hillside that rose like the tiers of seats in an opera house.
“Seats for twenty thousand, and every seat taken,” Isabelle whispered.
This, Gale thought, must be true. She found herself looking into a sea of faces. “The colonel’s army.” She swallowed hard. “Thousands of nice boys from my own native land. Tonight they are here to be entertained, and tomorrow, perhaps—” She closed her eyes on the morrow.
There were other features than theirs on the program. All the participants were on the stage.
When the great throng stood up, when some soldiers struck the chords of Star Spangled Banner and those men, twenty thousand of them, roared out the national anthem, Gale felt her soul lifted to the stars that shone above the treetops.
The colonel stepped to the microphone and like a football coach before the big game of the season, gave the boys a pep-talk that was brief as it was impressive.
A band swarmed onto the platform and played two stirring marches. The boys roared their approval.
“We—we’re next,” Gale gulped as the band trooped off.
The colonel announced them only as the Barber Shop Quartette. “They’ll think we’re boys,” Jan whispered.
They sang Sweet Adeline, giving it everything.
There came a scattered applause. “We’re a flop!” Gale thought.
Then a big rawboned tank sergeant from the deep south, who had somehow made a surprising discovery, stood up to roar:
“Hey! You guys! Them’s gals! How about givin’ ’em a hand?”
The applause was as great as the look of surprise on ten thousand faces.
Enheartened, Gale proposed a glorious song that had been the prime favorite of another war.
“There’s a long, long trail a-windingInto the land of my dreams,” they sang.“Where the nightingales are singingAnd the white moon beams.”
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,” they sang.
“Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams.”
Perhaps most of those boys had never heard that song. Perhaps in the hearts of the singers was the same old deep longing that hung over all of the Secret Forest. However that may have been, when the song ended—“Till the day when I’ll be walking down that long, long trail with you,” every boy was on his feet with a shout of approval.
It had been planned that Jan should sing a solo, dressed as a ragged colored man. “Oh, I can’t! I just can’t,” she wailed when they were back in the dressing room and the band was back on the stage.
“Oh, you’ll wow them!” Gale insisted.
And so, ten minutes later, dressed in a coat two sizes too large, striped trousers and plug hat, leaning on a cane, Jan slipped out on the platform alone. For ten seconds there was silence. Then a roar shook the treetops.
Jan had a strange voice. It wasn’t basso or tenor. It wasn’t contralto. Just a voice singing in a wilderness. But when she began to sing “Old Man River” there was absolute silence. When she sang on, rolling her eyes and swaying like a rolling river,
“That old man river, he must know somethingBut he don’t say nothin’He jes’ goes rolling along,”
“That old man river, he must know something
But he don’t say nothin’
He jes’ goes rolling along,”
the silence continued.
When she sang,—
“Tired of livin’ an’ feared o’ dying,” a great silence hung over the forest.
But when she finished, that forest exploded just as truly as it would have had the Japs staged an air raid.
Nothing would do after that short of an encore. So leaning on her cane, Jan sang: “Old Black Joe.”
Perhaps that song has been rendered in a better manner ten thousand times before, but you’d never convince those soldiers of that. They were from America. Old Black Joe was part of America.
“Listen to them!” Isabelle exclaimed. The applause came roaring back to them. “You don’t have to die for them, Jan. All you’ve got to do is sing for them.”
“I’ll sing for them!
“I’ll sing for them forever!” Jan sprang up.
This time she sang,—“I Got Plenty of Nothin’”, and as she sang she turned her pockets wrong side out, one by one.
In the middle of the song with all her empty pockets hanging out, she stopped suddenly.
“Say!” she exclaimed. “Has any of you all got a pipe?”
“Sure! Sure! Oh, sure!” came in a roar.
“That’s fine! Has any of you all got a little ’bacca?”
“Sure! Sure!” came again.
“That’s swell. Has any of you all got a match?”
The roar came again, this time accompanied with a shower of match boxes.
“Oh! You all keep ’em!” Jan shouted. “You all’s goin’ to need ’em—maybe tomorrow. Nobody don’t never know. But me,” she sang, “I got plenty of nothing, and nothing is plenty for me.”
That show was a huge success and it didn’t take a dramatic critic to tell that the Lady Barber Quartette had been THE feature that evening.
It was a shame to sneak off after they had received such a grand reception, but had they remained, they must surely have been crushed by the mob of boys in khaki eager to congratulate the girls from America. So, with the lady of the hour at the wheel, they piled into the old jeep and rode away.
“They’re such nice boys!” Isabelle murmured. “It seems terrible that some of them may die horrible deaths tomorrow, or the next day.”
“Perhaps not so many,” Gale replied hopefully. “Tonight while we were waiting for things to start the colonel told me how well things have been planned. He thinks they’ll just go sweeping across Burma into China. He says this is a diversionary move. The main fight will be farther south. The Japs don’t expect this so they won’t be prepared.”
“He told you all that?” Isabelle exclaimed. “Oh, well, nothing matters much. It won’t be long now. And at that, he didn’t tell you a great deal. They have been at it for months. In another forest quite a way from here, engines with portable saw mills have been cutting timber for bridges across the river that the colonel and his party waded on their retreat.
“It’s really marvelous. Every piece is cut just right. The bridges are set up, then taken down again in the forest. When the time comes the parts will be sent over chutes built down the mountain.
“They’ve built hundreds of boats too, and they’ll go down the chutes. The whole army will be in Burma before the Japs know they’re coming.”
“That’s marvelous.” Gale sighed. “I wish the boys luck, every one of them. One more thing I wish.”
“What’s that?” Isabelle asked.
“I wish I could hear from Jimmie.”
“Oh! That reminds me!” Isabelle exclaimed. “A flight commander was in to see the colonel today. The colonel was out, so I had a chance to talk to him. I asked him about Jimmie. He said he couldn’t tell me a thing, then smiled in a queer sort of way and said something about a secret mission. It all sounded very strange.”
“I’ll say it does!” Gale agreed.
“But,” Isabelle exclaimed. “Did you report what we saw at the temple?”
“About the woman in purple? Oh, sure I did! I told the colonel about it first.”
“What did he say,” Gale asked anxiously.
“He seemed interested. He’s seen the woman—met her at some big dinner. It seems that in India she is still quite a person. It’s only in China and Burma that she’s in bad.”
“That’s the way it is,” Gale exclaimed. “A woman in a glorious gown can get around men. I shouldn’t wonder if a lot of those English secret agents were really stupid.”
“Oh! They are!” Than Shwe agreed. “Some of them are very, very stupid.
“I meant to tell you,” she added as an afterthought, “that Chinese nurse, Mai-da, is coming to visit us tonight. Believe me, she will tell you about this Madam Stark, the woman in purple, as you call her. She will tell you plenty.”
“The colonel wasn’t taken in by this woman.” Isabelle defended her boss. “He just never has seen much of her—really doesn’t know much about her. He sent me over to the Army Intelligence Headquarters to report on her. The head man there was out. Nearly everyone is these days. Big things just around the corner, you know. A very nice boy with pink cheeks, blue eyes and a smile, wrote down all I told him.”
“And said he’d report on it,” Gale exploded. “Oh! Sure! That’s army life for you! My Dad said I’d have to be a good waiter. And if I get my head blown off by a bomb while I wait, what then? I saw the tall thin man who is lame in both legs again today.”
“You did?” Isabelle exclaimed. “Way up here?”
“Sure. On the ridge only half a mile from our hideout. What do you expect? He and that woman in purple are anti-British spies, I tell you! And they’re out to wreck us—have been ever since I put my radar fingers on those Jap planes up there in the clouds above the city and helped bring them down. They’ll get us if they can—yes—and the Three Secrets of Radar as well.”
At that moment a small round face appeared at the opening of the tent flap and a voice said: “May I come in?” It was Mai-da, the Chinese nurse.
“Come in! Come right on!” was their welcome.
Jan had been brewing tea. It was steeped now, so that all sat on the floor sipping tea, munching gingersnaps and talking.
“You have been a long time away from your home,” Gale said to Mai-da.
“Oh, yes! A very long time,” Mai-da agreed. “India has been very kind to me but I shall be glad to get back to my home. We ARE going back, you know.” Mai-da’s voice rose. “Everyone believes that. We have great faith in your major.”
As Gale looked at the Chinese girl with her small hands and feet, her round, doll-like face and slender body, she marvelled that she could stand up to the work of a nurse. But Mai-da had endured more than she dreamed.
“Tell us about your home, Mai-da,” Isabelle said.
“Oh, it is really very charming. At least I hope you may say so when you see it.” Mai-da half apologized. “It is at the foot of a hill where big, black pines seem to be marching. It has a high stone wall about it. Ours is an old, old family. Thirty generations have lived there. And we all live together there now, seventy people of us, but some have gone to war. Uncles, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, great-grand-father—they are all there.” She laughed softly.
“Once we nearly lost our home.” Her face sobered. “But perhaps you do not care for sad stories,—only those that are good, beautiful and happy.” Mai-da paused.
“We take life as we find it,” was Gale’s slow reply. “If there is evil in the world, if bad men and women seem to have their way, we want to know about it. But all the time we try to kid ourselves into believing that ‘God is in His heavens—all’s right with the world.’
“And perhaps we’re not kidding ourselves so much after all,” she added softly. “Tell us about the time you nearly lost your home, Mai-da.”
“It was truly terrible,” Mai-da murmured softly. “Wicked woman came to live in a large house built by a trader. It had been her husband’s house. He was gone now, so she claimed it. There was no one who could tell her to go away.”
“My grandfather, he is old and very wise. He said: ‘If Madam Stark lives in that house evil days will come to us’.”
“Madam Stark,” Isabelle murmured.
“The woman in purple,” Gale added. Mai-da continued in her sing-song voice, so slow and musical. She had learned English in a mission school and had traveled in America. “Grandfather was right. This woman hired many strong men to guard her men who thought China had no chance against the terrible Japs, men who said ‘It is better to give up and allow the Japs to rule us’.”
“The Japs came closer and closer to the beautiful little city of May-da, close to our home. There was a temple on the hill above our home. The Japs bombed it. Many priests were killed, and they were oh, such good men, those priests, always doing good, never harming anyone.”
Mai-da sighed deeply, then went on. “There was a war lord living close to our city. He pretended to be loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, but I don’t think he ever was. Madam Stark, in her purple gown of rich silk fascinated him. He did what she said.
“One day she said: ‘The Japs are very close to the city. The city will be captured. It is better to burn the city than to let the Japs have it.’
“So the war lord told his men to burn the city,” Than Shwe murmured sadly. “I have heard of this. It was very terrible.”
“The city was burned.” Mai-da’s voice was low. “Many people lost their life. Others wandered homeless in the fields. Our home is outside the city. We took in all the people we could.
“Then,”—her voice rose, “my grandfather, who was old but very brave, said, ‘This terrible woman must be driven out.’ He talked to all the people. They took all the guns and knives they had and went after that woman and if she had not gone away in a plane she would have been killed. Her big house was burned. The people joined with the soldiers. The Japs were driven back, and the poor burnt city was never captured. My home still smiles from the foot of the mountain. It waits for me.—Tomorrow or the day after,” the little Chinese nurse finished quite simply,—“I’m going home.”
“And that was the Woman in Purple,” Gale said, springing up. “If the army doesn’t get her then we must.”
“And we will!” Than Shwe exclaimed. “By all the gods of India, Burma, China and America, we will!”
For some time after retiring that night Gale lay on her army cot, eyes staring at the blank walls of her tent, fully awake. Through her mind whirled delicate chimes, ladies, long lines of marching soldiers and a city of many small houses surrounded by a wall. Then the scene changed, became more bright, but it shifted to her hillside. Bombers came whirling over, bombs dropped. She trembled with fright. And then she saw the black dwarf—or was it the thin man a little lame in both feet? As her mind held the picture the two figures appeared to merge into one. At that she fell asleep.
She awoke early next morning, routed the sleepy Jan from her cot, then headed for her hideout. That this might prove a day of great importance she knew right well. If the Japs had any way of guessing or knowing that soldiers were camped in the shade of the Secret Forest, their planes would come swarming over. And if she failed to detect them? “We can’t fail!” she declared to Jan as they climbed through the dark just before dawn to their roost among the rocks.
“Where do you get that ‘we’?” Jan exclaimed. “You know good and well that I’m only your orderly, or—or something.”
“You do your part, and do it well,” Gale insisted. “So together we stand.
“For all that,” she added, “you don’t need any more glory. You got your share last night.”
“Didn’t I wow them!” Jan laughed. “I could do it all over a hundred times and like it.
“But I keep thinking of those fine boys!” she added soberly. “How many do you think will get to go back to America after it’s over?”
“Probably most of them. The Japs can’t do much to a bunch like that. And Jan,”—Gale’s tone was thoughtful—“Did you ever stop to think that going to war isn’t a total loss?” “How’d you dope that out?” Jan demanded.
“Well now, look at those boys we tried to entertain last night. What would they be doing if the war hadn’t come along?”
“Going to school, shining shoes, driving tractors, selling shirts, making automobiles, and—”
“There you are!” Gale exclaimed. “Most of them wouldn’t have gotten more than a hundred miles from the old home town.”
“That’s right, and they’d have worked at the same old thing all their lives.”
“And now look!” Gale added eagerly. “Nine out of ten will get back home all okay, and what a lot they’ll have to talk about. India, Burma, China. They’ll know a lot too and maybe they’ll help this poor old world with a headache figure out some of its problems.”
“Well, yes, maybe.” Jan agreed grudgingly. “But you can’t sell me no war. I got into this one because I thought I was needed, and it was too big a thing to stay out of. But once it’s over, watch me get a job driving a pie wagon, or just anything.” Jan laughed merrily.
And so here they were at their station. And a busy station it was to be on that particular day.
“Jan, when do you think the big push into Burma will come?” Gale asked, a bit out of breath as they reached their roost.
“Oh, very soon!” was the prompt reply. “As your Jimmie would say, ‘there are signs’. Perhaps it will be tonight.”
“Then we’d better look out,” Gale replied solemnly.
They did look out every fifteen minutes throughout the forenoon. Gale’s radar fingers felt their way through the sky. There was a haze along the horizon. Those feeling fingers reached much farther than eyes could see.
“All quiet,” Gale said as the noon hour came. “Fifteen minutes out for lunch. It’s bright outside. Let’s go out and sit on a rock.”
Lunch was soon over. They ate little at noon. Then they spread themselves out on a narrow rock and gazed up at the cloudless sky.
“Nothing up there,” Jan murmured. “Doesn’t seem like there ever could be.
“Come where my love lies dreaming the happy hours away,” she sang softly.
“Don’t fool yourself.” Gale sat up, picking at the grass that grew by the edge of the rock. “This is war. War is never like that.”
Then, as if she had heard a phone ring,—which she had not—she sprang to her feet and hurried to her station.
Her radar set had not been humming more than a minute when she called excitedly:
“Jan! Come quick!”
“Coming!” Jan bounded into the lookout. “What’s up?”
“Plenty! Off a hundred miles due east the sky is filled with planes. Looks like a raid. Get headquarters at once!”
“Here you are,” Jan announced twenty seconds later.
“Headquarters?” Gale tried to keep her excitement out of her voice. “This is G. G. J. Looks like a raid. Many planes two hundred miles straight out.”
“Right,” was the answer. “Report again in five minutes.”
Five minutes later Gale’s report was:
“G. G. J., Refer to last report. No change except approaching at two hundred miles per hour. That’s all.”
That was all for Gale, at least for the time being. But for the pilots, radio men and gunners of two hundred of America’s finest fighter planes, it was but the beginning of something big, and for some, disaster.
“They know we’re here and now they’re after us,” Danny Dean, the pilot of a two-seater said to his gunner.
“Let them come,” was the prompt answer. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. The more we knock down here the less we’ll have to fight when the big business starts.”