Worcester Democrat and the ledger-enterprise. (Pocomoke City, Md.) 1921-1953, 1939-07-07
CHAPTER ONE


When Linda first saw Bill Blaine
she was up in the air-in more than
q figurative sense. It wasn't strange,
then, that this condition should pre-
vail; that Linda-so far as young DR..
Blaine was concerned-should remain
that way for some time.
Fate introduced Linda and DR..
Blaine, most unconventional scene,
for Linda, in white nurses uniform,
was perched on ladder upon roof
twenty-five stories above the ground.
And there, a few feet above her, in a
precarious position on a cross-beam
over a yawning elevator pit, crouched
DIR. Blaine, the hem of his white sur
gical smock about level with her eyes.
Amid the heavy cables and gears
of the elevator machinery was an e.
mergency job for a doctor and q
purse. Bill Blaine was doctor; Lin
da was a nurse.
That's how Linda happened to be
there, standing tip-toe on a ladder,
looking at :. love. At least, to Lin
>da, it looked like love. And love to
Linda was no chance stranger. They
had met somewhere before.
Whether Linda was in a condition
to recognize it was another matter
entirely. Mistaken identity is COM
mon in this regard, even to girls with
two feet planted solidly on earth. And
Linda's feet decidedly were not on ter
"a firma at the moment.
A ladder perch on a roof-top in the
elevator house of twenty-five story
skyscraper was no place for that.
Linda had been there five years
or five hours-or was it only the five
minutes indicated by her watch p
before she really saw Bill Blaine. In
all that time, up to this moment, she
had been too busy reaching up and
trying not to look downtown into
that awful, gaping pit below them
too busy really to see the man toward
whom she was reaching with metho-
'dical, almost mechanical motions.
The man was tall and bronzed and
his wavy hair, which looked blonder
than it was because of the contrast
to a complexion that could have been
an advertisement for sun effects, kept
blowing in the draft of the elevator
shaft. His eyes were nice and on the
blue side.
Linda knew the hands would be slim
and strong and well kept, although
she couldn't see them. Right now
they were covered by rubber gloves
and the gloves were dyed a deep red
=. It wasn't a pretty sight.
Neither was the face of the man
upon whom he was working. A third
man, another doctor, lowered on the
narrow cross beam.
Linda was spared from actually see
ing what they were doing. She saw
Bill Blaine instead-saw him perhaps
because she couldn't let herself see
the other-saw this blond young man
with the truant hair and the hands
that We're full.
The man on whom he worked would
never be bothered by full hands a
gain. They had been wide, powerful
hands, the hands of a mechanic, but
the only two he had. And now he
had one.
A building mechanic, workman on
a routine tour of inspection of the
elevator machinery which speeds the
cross-section of city, the skyscrap-
er's occupants and visitors, on verti-
cal flights to and from offices in the
building. No different today from
any other routine checkup of the we'll
tended machinery at the top the shaft.
No different-until :.
A terrible mistake, human mis-
take his arm was caught and
frightfully mangled between the ele-
vator cable and the massive spool
upon which it wound.
But for the state inspector, a few
feet behind the mechanic, there would