Rosemary Sample, an airplane stewardess, meets a mysterious dark lady on a flight to Salt Lake City. The plane is forced down overnight by a snowstorm. The passengers spend the night in a Hunting Lodge. In the morning, the dark lady finds her bag missing. It contains important papers that may mean the life or death of thousands of people in the small town of Happy Vale.
By : Roy J. Snell (1878 - 1959)
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Rosemary Sample adjusted her jaunty cap carefully, smoothed out her well-tailored suit, then lowering her head, stepped from her trans-continental airplane.
Oh yes, that was Rosemary’s plane. Rosemary was still young, and she looked even younger than her years. A slender slip of a girl was Rosemary, rather pretty, too, with a touch of natural color and a dimple in each cheek, white even teeth, smiling eyes of deepest blue.
Strange sort of person to have a huge bi-motored plane with two 555 horse-power motors and a cruising speed of one hundred and seventy miles per hour. It cost seventy thousand dollars did that airplane. Yet this slip of a girl was its captain, its conductor, its everything but pilot, as long as it hung in air. Rosemary was its stewardess—and that meant a very great deal.
Rosemary stepped across the cement runway with a buoyant tread. “Life,” she thought with a happy tilt of her head, “is just wonderful! It is perfection itself.”
Rosemary loved perfection. And where may one find perfection of high degree if not in a great metropolitan airport? Those giant silver birds of the air, their motors drumming in perfect unison, wheeling into position for flight—how perfect! The touch of genius, the brain and brawn of the world’s greatest has gone into their making. And as to the care of them, Rosemary knew that the most valuable horse in the world never received more perfect treatment.
The depot, too, was perfect. Its hard white floor was spotless. The ticket sellers, the loitering aviators, even the black-faced redcaps somehow appeared to fit into a perfect picture.
“The travelers and their luggage,” she whispered, “they too fit in. No shabby ones. No drab ones. Per—”
She did not finish for of a sudden, as if caught and banged against a post, her picture was wrecked, for a young man apparently unsuited to the place had dashed through the depot’s outer door and, grasping her by the arm, said in a low hoarse whisper:
“I must speak to you personally, privately.”
For a space of ten seconds there was grave danger that Rosemary would deviate from the path of duty, that she would smash Rule No. 1 for all airplane hostesses into bits. “Courtesy to all,” that was the rule. And in the end the rule won.
Getting a steady grip on herself, the girl glanced about, noted that the small room to the right was at that moment vacant, motioned her strangely distraught visitor—who, if appearances could be trusted, must have slept the night before in an alley and fought six policemen single-handed in the morning—inside, after which she closed the door.
“Than—oh thank you!” the young man gasped.
Then for a period of seconds he seemed quite at a loss as to what he might say next.
This gave the girl an opportunity for a swift character analysis. She was accustomed to this. She had flown for two years. Four hundred thousand miles of flying were down to her credit. Passengers, usually ten of them, flew with her. It was her duty to keep them comfortable and happy. To do this she must know them, though she had seen them but for an hour...
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