From Painful
p. 50 · Read in the full issue
Happy Relief
Backache
Cau-ed by Tired Kidneys
Many of those gnawing, nagging, painful backaches people blame on colds or strains are often caused by tired kidneys—and can be relieved when treated in the right way.
The kidneys are one of Nature’s chief ways of taking acids and wastes out of the blood.
A healthy person should pass about 3 pints a day and so get rid of more than 3 pounds of waste matter.
If the 15 miles of lidney tubes and filters don’t work well, this poisonous waste stays in the body. It may start nagging backaches, leg pains, loss of pep and energy, getting up nights, lumbago, swollen feet and ankles, pufflness under the eyes, rheumatic pains and dizziness Don’t let it lay you up.
Ask your chemist for DOAN’S BACKACHE KIDNEY PILLS . . used successfully the world over by millions of people. They give quick relief and will help to flush out the 15 miles of kidney tubes. So be sure you get
Doan’S Backache Kidney Pills.
sane. And there were still a few allies.
There was the tide-level indicator, for in stance—an upright plank with fascinating oblique stay wires. It helped. And there were the frigate birds with their spectacu lar nose dives; and the lively hydrogen filled balloons which each morning rocket ted straight up into the still air. He en vied them; they climbed so easily out of the frame that fettered him. (But he couldn’t force himself to plot their hori zontal drift; only their vertical ascension was ever recorded.) AND, most faithful of all, there was the log—the- gift of some capricious cur rent —that had stranded on the white beach just in time to prevent Lennox from slipping entirely over the edge.
From the first he had, as Dale said, worshipped this unlovely, barnacled thing.
It was so restfully different to his tortured mind; it had nothing in common with the sea and the sand; it bravely broke the dazzling line of the beach and, best of all, its position could be arranged so that it cut athwart those infernal hori zontals. From the first, his eye had sought it unbidden and left it Reluctantly. Should the sand have drifted over it, or should its position have been changed so that it came not into view at the expected time, there was a distinct sense of loss.
Later, Dale had come to realise the log’s usefulness as a fishing adjunct and would
innocently leave it lying along the water s edge—thus adding another parallel to war against his companion’s reason. Tnus had begun the trouole that, gaining impetus each day, had culminated in the present crisis.
A whim! That is what Dale had called his insistence that the log be left un touched. A whim, was it? Would he go to the lengths he was planning for a mere idle whim? No! He was fighting for his sanity—yet Dale hadn’t the wit to see it.
He would sacrifice much for that—even Dale, he had decided. There seemed no other way.
Absent-mindedly, he scored a cross in the sand. A fascinating design, the simple cross, he mused; altogether pleasing, even apart from its symbolism. Equal and op posite lines—definitely terminating—per fect balance—instead of those abhorred parallels that led the eye and the brain into hopeless infinity.
It was dark now. From the hut came the cough of the engine and the crash of the wireless spark as Dale said good night to the outside world. Purposefully— his mind made up—Lennox rose, climbed the sandy path and entered the trans mitting room unobserved. He struck.
The wireless shrilled a sustained and eerie howl as Dale’s body fell across the signalling key. Then it suddenly ceased and not all the long and puzzled calls from the mainland could break that om inous silence.
FOR some time thereafter Lennox was very busy; too busy to notice his lone liness or the phenomenally low state of the barometer. When the cyclone had passed, the island had been swept clean.
Masts, station, everything had gone down before the onslaught of those savage winds and unprecedented seas.
One only remained to puzzle the landing party from the relief ship. It was a cross, staunchly built of two sections of rough-hewn log, with a cross-arm deliberately “cockbilled”, and the up right firmly stayed with diagonal haw sers.