loser to Johnny. "Say, if it's any of my business, how much did Abe
Smith tax yuh for that linen?" His tone was languid, tinged with a
chronic resentment against circumstance.

Johnny turned a startled stare upon him, seemed on the point of telling
him that it was not any of his business, and with the next breath yielded
to his hunger for speech with a human being, however lowly, whose
intelligence was able to grasp so exalted a subject as aircraft.

"Dunno yet--I'll have to look it up on the bill," he said with a cheerful
indifference that implied long familiarity with such matters.

"Looks to me like some of the same lot he stung me with last fall, is why
I asked. Abe will sting you every time the clock ticks. Why don't yuh
send to the Pacific Supply Company? They're real people. Got better
stuff, and they'll treat you right whether you send or go yourself. Take
it from me, bo, when you trade with Abe Smith you want a cop along."

Johnny fingered the linen, his face gone sober. "I told him to send the
best he had in stock," he said.

"Well, maybe he done it, at that," the hobo conceded. "His stock's
rotten, that's all."

"I was looking the bunch over so I could shoot it back to him if it
wasn't all right," Johnny explained with dignity. "They sure can't work
off any punk stuff on me, not if I know it."

The hobo flipped his cigarette stub into the sand and stared out across
the depressing huddle of adobe huts and raw, double-roofed shacks that
comprised Agua Dulce. His pale eyes blinked at the glare, his mouth
drooped sourly at the corners.

"Believe me, bo, if you're stranded in _this_ hole with a busted plane,
yuh better not take on any contract of arguing with Abe Smith. He'll
stall yuh off till you forget how to fly." He turned his pale stare to
Johnny with a new interest. "You aren't making a transcontinental, are
you?"

"Well--n-no. Not yet, anyway. I--live here." You may not believe it, but
Johnny was beginning to feel apologetic--and before a hobo, of all men.

"The deuce you do!" The tramp hitched himself up on another vertebra
of his limp spine. "Why, I thought you were probably just making a
cross-country flight, and had a wreck. I was going to bone yuh for a
lift, in case you were alone. You _live_ here! Why, for cat's sake?"

"Gawd knows," said Johnny. Then added impulsively, "I don't expect to go
on living here always. I'm going to beat it, soon as I get my airplane
repaired, and--" He was on