er's debt was paid. Yet Mary V felt a
heaviness in her heart, and though she listened to all the wonderful
things Johnny meant to do, she could not feel that they were really
possible.

Something else troubled Mary V, but just now, with Johnny there before
her almost like one risen from the grave, she dreaded to recognize the
thing that shadowed the back of her mind. Johnny turned his head and
looked at her, and she forced a smile that held so little joy that even
Johnny was perturbed.

"What's the matter? Don't you believe I can do it?" he challenged her
instantly. "There's no reason why I can't. It's being done all the
time. Other flyers make as much money as your dad makes here on the
ranch. And--you know yourself, Mary V, I couldn't settle down and be
just a rider again. Fighting bronks is too tame, now--too slow. I'll
have to make a flyer of you, Mary V, and then you'll know--"

Mary V suddenly buried her face in a cushion. Johnny heard a smothered
sob and got up, looking very much astonished and perturbed. With a
glance over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him, ho put an arm
awkwardly around her shaking shoulders.

"If you don't want to fly, you needn't," he reassured her. "I didn't
mean you had to. I only meant--"

"It--it isn't that at all," Mary V managed to enunciate more or less
clearly. "But we've been simply crazy, worrying about you and thinking
all kinds of horrible things, and--"

"Well, but I'm all right, you see, so you don't need to worry any more.
I was all right all the time, if you had only known it. You don't want
to let that give you a prejudice against flying. It's just as safe as
riding bronks."

"It--it isn't the safeness." Mary V choked back a sob and wiped her
eyes. "But you don't seem to take it seriously at all!"

"Now, you know I do! It's the most serious thing in my whole
life---except you, of course. And you know--"

"I don't mean that!" Mary Y gave a small stamp with her slipper toe on
the porch floor, thereby proving how swiftly her resilient young self
was coming back to a normal condition after the strain of the past
forty-eight hours. "You ought to know what I mean."

Johnny sat down again and looked at her with his eyebrows pulled
together. Mary V had always been more or less puzzling in her swift
changes of mood, wherefore this sudden change in her did not greatly
surprise him.

"Well, what do you mean, then?" he asked patiently. "Seems