When we landed at Bogota for a 20-minute stop we discovered the three men weren't bank robbers or anything of the kind. (The airport officials recognized them at once—with a great deal of excited, wild-eyed yammering. They were, we learned, the leaders of the Maracca revolutionary party. Emilio Maracca himself, who wanted to be Dictator, was among them—the muscular one who had given us orders to head for Lake Antilla. And by delivering them to the authorities we had, it seemed, cut the heart out of an insurrection that was to have begun in two days.
"Boy," I said to Bill Hornay when we flew on for Guayaquil, "you'll get a medal or something for this!
But all he got was a cablegram. It was waiting for him when we returned to Barranquilla. Bill stood staring at it with stunned eyes. He must have read it half a dozen times before he finally passed it on to me. He didn't talk. Maybe he couldn't just then. I took the paper and read: so We can shake hands and end feud "Great work stop please come home
Before you return to your flying stop did you know Maracca had threatened to revoke all foreign concessions and drive us out of country if he came to power stop always knew I needed a DO to represent our interests down there stop love dad."
It was a long room, all oyster white, with uniform white beds against both walls, Near the door sat Miss Deane, R. N., primly severe as she watched the blue-gowned scrub nurses collect the charts from the backs of the beds.
In each of these beds was a woman. Some dozed in the afternoon light. Some leaned on elbows to read. One or two whispered across the little tables. And behind a white folding screen near the end of the room one woman was dying.
Everybody in the ward knew that she was dying. Some remembered when she came in, just two weeks before. An orderly had wheeled her in, and she had been put in that very bed. 7 For several days an oxygen' tank bubbled beside her bed, and she had sat, propped on pillows, with two tubes leading into her nostrils. Then took the tank away, and everybody thought she was getting better.
But now she was dying. That was why they had the white screen around her. Twenty minutes before, a ran had tiptoed behind the screen. And now he was sitting with her, and holding her hand
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.