, so you can easily see it in
this moonlight. Luck's with us; I was afraid we might have to wait
until morning, but this is fine. Several hours will be saved."

"I've got you," Johnny said--and he did not mean what Cliff thought he
meant. "All ready? Contact!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

JOHNNY ACTS BOLDLY

Off to the right and flying high, two government planes circled slowly
over the boundary line. Long before the Thunder Bird had put the map
of Mexico behind her the two planes veered that way, their fishlike
fuselages and the finned rudders gleaming like silver in the moonlight.
Cliff, happening to glance that way, moved uneasily in his seat and
cursed the moon he had so lately blessed.

"Better duck down somewhere; can't you dodge 'em?" he yelled back at
Johnny, who was himself eyeing perturbedly the two swift scouts.

"You let me handle this. It's what I'm paid for," he yelled back, and
banked the Thunder Bird sharply to the left. He had not yet crossed
the border; until he did so those scouting machines dare not do more
than keep him in view. But keeping him in view was absurdly simple in
that cloudless sky, white-lighted by the moon.

To a person looking up from the earth, the situation would have
appeared to be simple--a matter of three planes zooming homeward after
a long practice flight. The five-pointed star in the black circle,
painted on each wing Of the government planes, would probably have been
invisible at that height, and the bold lettering of THE THUNDER BIRD
indistinguishable also on the shadowed underside of the outlaw plane.
To the government planes she was branded irrevocably as they looked
down upon her from their superior height. There was no mistaking her,
no hope whatever that the scouts might think her anything but the
outlaw plane she was, flying in the face of international law,
trafficking in treason, fair game if she once crossed the line.

On she went, boring through the night, heading straight for Tia Juana,
which lies just south of the line. Just north of that invisible line
her pursuers held doggedly to the course.

"Turn back," Cliff turned to shout to Johnny who was driving big-eyed,
his lips pursed with the tense purpose that held him to his work.
"Turn back and land at the rancho. We'll never make Los Angeles with
those damned buzzards after us. I'll have to notify Sch--somebody."

"Send him a thought message, then."

"Turn back when I tell you!" Cliff t