250

Inside the bus you find Kate lying across the rear seat. Despite the heat she is covered with a blanket and is shivering fitfully. Aunt Betty-Ann, who is a qualified county nurse, is kneeling by her side, dabbing the beads of sweat from Kate’s ashen face and trying to soothe her with words of reassurance.

‘What’s wrong?’ you ask, anxiously.

‘I reckon it’s food poisoning,’ she replies. ‘There were a few mushrooms in a meal she ate ’bout an hour ago.’

She continues to wipe her face, and then suddenly she blurts out: ‘Dammit! I know they were checked, but when I looked just now I found one that was a wrong ’un. Fly Agaric. Don’t know how the heck it got in with the others, seein’ how careful we were when we packed the food in Tucson.’

‘Will she be OK?’ you ask alarmed.

‘She’s a strong girl and she’s fighting it, but this is serious poison, Cal. The mushroom she ate contains an alkaloid called Muscarine. It’s—’ Your aunt notices the fear in your eyes and stops in mid-sentence.

‘She’ll be OK, Cal. She’s strong … she’ll be OK.’

‘Isn’t there something we can do, something we can give her to help her fight it? For crying out loud, we can’t just let her … let her die!’

You feel your aunt gripping your hand tightly, as you try to combat the fear that is churning your stomach and numbing your mind. ‘What she really needs is Atropine. It’ll neutralize the alkaloid and her body’ll do the rest. We’ve searched the colony’s medical supplies and the drugstores in this town but none’s been found. All we can do is hope she’s strong enough to get through the next few hours.’

‘Aunt Betty-Ann, what are her chances, I mean, her real chances o’ pullin’ through?’

‘To be honest, Cal,’ she replies, her voice wavering, ‘they’re less than fifty per cent.’

Quietly you leave the bus. Rickenbacker appears and says something about the roadster but his words do not register. The gnawing fear that you could lose Kate fills your thoughts and blocks out everything. Numbly you wander back to the roadster and sit alone in the driving seat, staring unseeingly at the swirling clouds of dust as you try to come to terms with what has happened. At length you decide to try to find some Atropine. As if you have suddenly awoken from a dream, your mind comes alive and you are galvanized into action.

You take out your map and search for your present location. You reason that Atropine is not something you would normally find in a downtown drugstore, but you would expect to find it in a hospital. Quickly you scour the map and discover that the nearest hospitals to Gila Bend are in Ajo and Casa Grande.

Consult your map before deciding which of the hospitals you will visit.

If you wish to drive to Ajo and search there, turn to 129.

If you choose to go to Casa Grande and search there, turn to 172.