to tighten a turnbuckle that was letting a
cable sag a little.

"Hello, old top--how they using yuh?" greeted a voice that had in it a
familiar, whining note.

Johnny's muscles stiffened. Hostility, suspicion, surprise surged
confusingly through his brain. He turned as one who was bracing
himself to meet an enemy, with a primitive prickling where the bristles
used to rise on the necks of our cavemen ancestors.

CHAPTER TWO

AND THE CAT CAME BACK

"Why, hello, Bland," Johnny exclaimed after the first blank silence.
"I thought you was tied up in a sack and throwed into the pond long
ago!"

The visitor grinned with a sour droop to his mouth, a droop which
Johnny knew of old. "But the cat came back," he followed the simile,
blinking at Johnny with his pale, opaque blue eyes. "What yuh doing
here? Starting an aviation school?"

"Yeah. Free instruction. Want a lesson?" Johnny retorted, only half
the sarcasm intended for Bland; the rest going to the town that had
failed to disgorge a buyer for what he had to sell.

"Aw, I suppose you think you could give me lessons, now you've learned
to do a little straightaway flying without landing on your tail," Bland
fleered, with the impatience of the seasoned flyer for the novice who
thinks well of himself and his newly acquired skill. "Say, that was
some bump you give yourself on the dome when we lit over there in that
sand patch. I tried to tell yuh that sand looked loose--"

"Yes, you did--not! You was scared stiff. Your face looked like the
inside of a raw bacon rind!"

"Sure, I was scared. So would you of been if you'd a known as much
about it as I knew. I knew we was due to pile up, when you grabbed the
control away from me. You'll make a flyer, all right--and a good one,
if yuh last long enough. But you can't learn it all in a day, bo--take
it from me. Anyway, I got no kick to make. It was you and the plane
that got the bumps. All I done was bite my tongue half off!"

Boy that he was, Johnny laughed over this. The idea of Bland biting
his tongue tickled him and served to blur his antagonism for the tricky
aviator who had played so large a part in his salvaging of this very
airplane.

"Uh course you'll laugh--but you wasn't laughing then. I'll say you
wasn't. I thought you was croaked. Cost something to repair the
plane, too. I'm saying it did. Had to have a new propeller, and a new
crank-case for the motor--cost the old man at the ran