m to let the whole country know I've got an
airplane--and besides, it will save the walk back and forth from your
work. I'll see you again this evening."

Bland Halliday looked around him at the blank rock walls and opened his
mouth for protest. But Johnny was in the saddle and gone, and even when
Halliday cried, "Aw, say!" after him he did not look back. He followed
Johnny to the mouth of the cleft and stood there looking after him with a
long face until Johnny disappeared into a slight depression, loped out
again and presently became, to the aviator's eyes, an indistinguishable,
wavering object against the sky line. Whereupon Bland gazed no more, but
went thoughtfully back to his task.

It was some time after that when Mary V, riding up on a ridge a mile or
so north of the stage road that linked a tiny village in the foothills
with the railroad, stopped to reconnoiter before going farther.
Reconnoitering had come to be so much of a habit with Mary V that every
little height meant merely a vantage point from which she might gaze out
over the country to see what she could see.

She gazed now, and she saw Johnny Jewel--or so she named the rider to
herself--hover briefly beside the Sinkhole mail box nailed to a post
beside the stage road, and then go loping back toward the south as though
he were in a great hurry. Mary V watched him for a minute, turned to
survey the country to the southwest, and discerned far off on the horizon
a wavering speck which she rightly guessed was the stage.

She rode straight down the ridge to the mail box, grimly determined to
let no little clue to Johnny Jewel's insufferable behavior escape her.
Johnny was up to something, and it might be that the mail box was worth
inspecting that morning. So Mary V rode up and inspected it.

There was not much, to be sure; merely a letter addressed to the Pacific
Supply Company at Los Angeles. Mary V held it to the sun and learned
nothing further, so she flipped the letter back into the box and rode on,
following the tracks Johnny's horse had made in the loose soil. She was
so busy wondering what Johnny was ordering, and why he was ordering it,
that she had almost reached Sinkhole Camp before it occurred to her that
Johnny had that unpleasant stranger with him, and that it might be
awkward meeting the two of them without any real excuse. Johnny himself
knew enough not to expect any excuse for her behavior. Strangers were
different.

But she need not