de about exhibition flying.

Johnny did not know that as he went after gas his step was springier
than it had been for a long, long while. He did not know why it was
that he whistled while he filled the torpedo-shaped tank--indeed,
Johnny did not even know that he whistled, nor that it was the first
time since he had worked over his plane down at Sinkhole Camp when all
his dreams were bright, and bad luck had not knocked at his door. Yet
he did whistle while he made ready for flight, and his eyes were big
and round and eager, said he moved with the impatient energy of a youth
going to his favorite game. These signs Mary V would have recognized
immediately; Johnny did not know the signs existed.

Bland helped himself to a pair of new coveralls of Johnny's and
tinkered with the motor. Johnny went around the plane, testing cables
and trying to conceal even from himself his new hope of keeping it.

"All right, bo," Bland announced at last. "Kick the block away and
let's run her out. She sounds pretty fair--better than I expected."

It pleased Johnny that Bland seemed to take it as a matter of course
that he should occupy the front seat. The last time they had flown
together, Bland had occupied it perforce, with Johnny and two guns
behind him. After all, Johnny reflected, he would not have been so
suspicious of Bland if Mary V had not influenced him. And every one
knows that girls take notions with very little reason for the
foundation. Bland was a bum, but the little cuss seemed to want to
make good, and a man would be pretty poor stuff that wouldn't help a
fellow reform.

With that comfortable readjustment of his mental attitude toward the
birdman, Johnny strapped himself in, pulled down his goggles while
Bland eased in the motor. He saw Bland glance to right and left with
the old vigilance. He felt the testing of controls, the unconscious
tensing of nerves for the start. They raced down the calf pasture,
nosed upward and went whirring away from a dwindling earth, straight
toward the heart of the dawn.

It was like drinking of some heady wine that blurs one's troubles and
pushes them far down over the horizon. Johnny forgot that he had
problems to solve or worries that nagged at him incessantly. He forgot
that Mary V, away off there to the southwest, had probably cried
herself to sleep the night before because he had disappointed her. He
was flying up and away from all that. He was soaring free as a