“Welcome to the sunshine city!” Cherry stared forlornly at the big placard. Tucson certainly deserved its nickname, but there was nobody at the Municipal Airport to welcome here. The waiting room, a glass-fronted portion of three huge hangars, made her feel as though she were surrounded by miles and miles of planes. After a while she wandered over to a bench and sat down with her suitcase and coat at her feet.

What could have happened to Kirk?

When Cherry had left her home in Hilton, Illinois, it had been snowing hard. And when she boarded the plane in Chicago that morning, she had been grateful for the warmth of her interlined coat. But now, here in Arizona, although it was five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in late February, she was almost too warm in her smart red flannel suit and wished she had worn her white Nylon blouse instead of a sweater.

But she had been told that as soon as the sun dropped down behind the mountains the air would grow steadily cooler and so she had packed in her bag some twin sweater sets and a warm sports jacket. In the bat, too, were seven white uniforms and caps, a bathing suit, T-shirts, a bright checkered cowboy shirt which her twin brother, Charlie, had given her, blue jeans, donated by her father who said that in Arizona they were called “Levis”; new, shiny riding boots, a gift from her mother, and from Cherry’s harum-scarum young neighbor, Midge Fortune, an atomizer containing Cherry’s favorite brand of perfume.

Lieutenant Cherry Ames, of the Army Nurse Corps, training at Randolph Field, Texas, to become a flight nurse, decided to take time out, this hot September morning, for a coke.

In the PX — the post exchange — Cherry ran into her old friend Ann Evans. Ann, looking pale, was buying cigarettes.

“Why, Annie, you don’t smoke!” Cherry protested.

“No, but my pilot does,” Ann replied grimly. “We made a pact. Anyone who gets airsick on training flights has to buy the crew chief a carton of cigarettes. Not only am I flipsy-flopsy in the stomach — I’m going broke!”

Cherry grinned. “You’ll outgrow it as I did. Come on over here to the soda fountain and have a cup of tea.”

Cherry stopped in front of the Hilton Hospital and glanced at her wrist watch. She was not due to be on duty for twenty minutes. She stood for a moment, enjoying the sunshine and the fresh, sweet air of spring. What a glorious morning!

In the sky overhead a small plane was circling about. Shading her eyes with her hand, Cherry watched it it descend slowing in widening spirals and bank to come in for a landing at the new private airport outside Hilton.

“I wouldn’t mind being up in a place myself this morning,” Cherry thought dreamily.

“Nurse Ames, you have a very bad case of spring fever,” she heard a voice boom.

Startled, she turned her head and saw Dr. Watson, a wide grin on his face, beside her. “Check that fever at the door,” he told her, laughing. “It’s highly contagious.”

“Good morning, Doctor. You sneaked up or I would have heard you, “she accused him as he started up the walk. Her eyes followed his clumsy, bearlike figure to the entrance. She had a warm spot in her heart for Dr. Ray Watson who was in charge of Men’s Orthopedic Ward. He had been patient, understanding, and always cheerful when she was a nurse on his ward.

Cherry was now one of the Emergency nurses and was often the nurse on one of his cases. Dr. Watson handled accident cases involving orthopedics, such as fractures and other conditions which caused interference with the use of bones and joints.

Cherry forgot the sunny sky and the plane and walked through the door into the antiseptic small of the hospital. The quick change from the air outside made her nose prickle as always, but the odor quickly became familiar and she felt completely at home.

“Good morning, Miss Ames.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Peters,” Cherry returned the greeting from the head nurse on Orthopedic Ward.

“Whenever you’ve had enough of Emergency,” Mrs. Peters said with a smile, “remember, I can always use an extra nurse.”

“I’ll say we can,” declared Nurse Ruth Dale, as she came in the door and fell in step with Cherry. “We’re always short of nurses, you know that.”

“Hospitals are always short of nurses,” agreed Cherry. They went on down the corridor toward the section where the nurses had their lockers. “It’s a complaint as common as the common cold, or haven’t you heard?” Cherry asked airily.

Ruth made a face at her, taking the teasing in good nature. She and Cherry had been on duty in the same ward and had been good friends for a long time. Ruth was frank to say that Cherry was shining proof that beauty and brains went together. Cherry’s dark-brown, almost black eyes, black curly hair, and red cheeks, which had won her the name of Cherry, always called forth admiring remarks. Her patients appreciated her cheerful presence.

Now that the April sun had slid down behind the rocky ridges, it was cold in the valley. Cherry hurried along, hoping Bertha would have set a match to the blazing logs in the fireplace of their small room behind the makeshift clinic.

Cherry was as tired as she had ever been in her whole nursing career, but she knew that plump Bertha Larsen, who had been hobbling around on crutches all day, would be even more exhausted. Cherry glanced up at the sunset, veiled by the mist that hung above the thickly wooded mountain. Lonely little cabins perched precariously on the lower slopes of it; gray unpainted barns dotted the hillsides. Between the pastures and the farm lands narrow dirt lanes spiraled, following the path of mountain streams.

In the growing twilight, Cherry felt hemmed in by the dark-green palisades. There was something almost sinister about the shadows that lay across the valley floor. Desolate Mountain had certainly been well named. Cherry felt sure that there could not be another village in the whole state of Kentucky as isolated as Heartbreak Hollow.

But in spite of the fact that the people were poor and, for the most part, ignorant, it was a happy place. Daniel Boone, it was said, had given the village its name, because, after an attack by the Indians, only two of the original frontier families had survived. Later, other pioneers had come to build their log cabins and to struggle for existence side by side with the Smiths and the Clarkes. They brought with them the customs, idioms, and traditions of their English, Scottish, and Irish ancestors, and even now the older members of the community were reluctant to relinquish them.

The children, in spite of their sporadic schooling, were slowly but surely freeing themselves of the idioms and superstitions. In general, the fathers although they kept saying they didn’t want to be “beholden” to the doctor and nurse, were much more modern-minded than the mothers. But the grandparents were not of the twentieth century and didn’t want to be.

The big silver-gray bus stopped at the junction just long enough for Cherry to jump off and reach up for the bags which the driver handed down to her. Then with a derisive blast of its horn it sped away as though it wished to shake off the dust of this desolate countryside.

“Weatherly,” Cherry though, “must be the tiniest village in the while U.S. A. And yet it’s only four hours from New York City, and once was a prosperous mining town.”

The only buildings still standing was the abandoned railroad station which consisted of a baggage platform precariously attached to an unpainted shack that looked as though it were going to collapse any minute from sheer boredom. A dirt road stretched away from the junction to lose itself in far-off scrubby hills. Cherry knew that on one of those hills was a hospital. Somebody on the staff should be driving down the road now to meet the new night supervisor.

Night supervisor! Cherry could hardly believe that this evening she would actually be on duty in that coveted role. The opportunity had been offered to her by Dr. Van Laughton, Chief of the Pediatric Service of Spencer Hospital where Cherry had trained. Last fall she had gone back for duty in the new Children’s Wing. At Dr. Laughton’s suggestion she had continued her postgraduate training, working as assistant to the Superintendent of Nurses in order to fit herself for a supervisory position at Weatherly Hospital.

“It’s one of the oldest institutions in the country,” Dr. Laughton had told Cherry. “The main section, which is in an old frame building, was built way back when surgery was in its infancy and asepsis was unheard of. But don’t let that worry you. The new wings are as modern as anything here at Spencer, and what is more important, they’ve got Bates Darby on staff. How they wangled it, I’ll never know. But he’s there, and since most babies are born at night or in the early morning, you’ll be working closely with one of the leading obstetricians in North America. At the end of this assignment, which will probably amount to a post-graduate course in midwifery, you can classify yourself as an obstetrical nurse.”

It was Dr. Joe Fortune who had give Cherry a more complete picture of what her new job would be like. Dr. Joe, who lived near Cherry’s home in Hilton, Illinois, had brought her and her twin brother, Charlie, into the world. He had inspired her to take up nursing and she had never regretted her decision. Through her work she had made many warm friends who had shared exciting adventures with her and had helped her solve some really baffling mysteries.