Cliff smiled faintly one morning and handed Johnny a long manila
envelope over their breakfast table in Mateo's cabin. "Your third
week's salary," he idly explained. "Do you want it?"
"Well, I ain't refusing it," Johnny grinned back. "I guess maybe I'll
stick for another week, anyway." He emptied his coffee cup and held it
up for Mateo's woman to refill, trying to match Cliff Lowell's careless
air of indifference to the presence of seventeen hundred dollars on
that table. "That is, if you think I'm making good," he added
boyishly, looking for praise.
"Your third week's salary answers that, doesn't it? From now on it may
not be quite so easy to make good. Perhaps, since I want to go across
this evening as late as you can make a safe landing over there, I ought
to tell you that a border patrol saw us yesterday, coming back, and
wondered a little at a government plane getting over the line. He did
not report it, so far as I know. But he will make a report the next
time he sees the same thing happen."
"I wish I didn't have that name painted clear across her belly," Johnny
fretted. "But if I went and painted it out it would all be black, and
that would be just as bad. And if I took off the letters with
something, I'm afraid I'd eat off the sizing too, or weaken the fabric
or something. I ought to recover the wings, but that takes time--"
Cliff gave him that tolerant smile which Johnny found so intolerable.
"It is not at all necessary. I thought of all possible contingencies
when I first saw the Thunder Bird. Across the line the name absolutely
identifies it, which is rather important. On this side it is known as
a bird fond of doing the unusual. Your reputation, old man, may help
you out of a tight place yet. Now we are duck hunters, remember.
Hereafter we shall be hunting ducks with an airplane--something new,
but not at all improbable, especially when it is the Thunder Bird doing
the hunting. We must carry our shotguns along with us, and a few ducks
as circumstantial evidence. If we stray across the line accidentally,
that will be because you do not always look where you are flying, and
watch the landmarks."
"This, of course, in case we are actually caught. Though I do not see
why that should happen. They have no anti-aircraft guns to bring us
down. It may be a good idea to carry an auxiliary tank of gasoline in
case of an emergency."
"I don't see why--not if I fill up over there every time I land. I can
stay up three hours--longer, if I can glide a lot. Of course that high
altitude takes more, in climbing up, and flying while you're up there,
but the distance is short. I'll chance running outa gas. I don't want
the extra weight, flying high as we have to. The motor's doing all she
wants to do, just carrying us."
Cliff did not argue the point, but went out to his car, fussed with it
for a few minutes, and then drove off on one of the mysterious trips
that took him away from Mateo's cabin and sometimes kept him away for
two days at a time. Johnny did not know where Cliff went; to see the
boss, perhaps, and turn in what news he had gleaned--if indeed he had
succeeded in gleaning any. Sometimes the long waits were tiresome to a
youth who loved action. But Johnny had been schooled to the monotony
of a range line-camp, and if he could have ridden over the country
while he waited, he would not have minded being left idle most of the
time.
But he did not dare leave camp for more than half an hour or so at a
time, because he never knew what minute Cliff might return and want
him; and when one is being paid something like ten dollars an hour,
waking or sleeping, for his time, one feels constrained to keep that
precious time absolutely available to his employer. At least, Johnny
felt constrained to do so. He could not even go duck hunting. Mateo
hunted the ducks, using Johnny's gun or Cliff's, and seldom failing to
bring back game. It would be ducks shot by Mateo which would furnish
the circumstantial evidence which Cliff mentioned that morning.
Johnny went out to the Thunder Bird, shooed three kids from under the
wings, and began to fuss with the motor. One advantage of being idle
most of the time was the easy life the Thunder Bird was leading. The
motor was not being worn out on this job, at any rate.
So far he had not spent a hundred dollars of his salary on the upkeep
of his machine. He was glad of that, because he already had enough to
pay old Sudden and have the price of a car left over. With the Thunder
Bird clear, and a couple of thousand dollars to the good--why, he would
not change places with the owner of the Rolling R himself! He could go
back any time and vindicate himself to the whole outfit. He could pick
Mary V up and carry her off now, without feeling that he was taking any
risk with her future. Poor little girl, she would be wondering what
had become of him; he'd write, or send a wire, if Cliff would ever open
his heart enough to take a fellow with him to where there was a
post-office or something.
He was beginning to feel a deep need of some word from Mary V, was
Johnny. He was beginning to worry, to grow restive down here in the
wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing save kill time between those
short, surreptitious flights across to the notched ridge and back
again. Two weeks of that was beginning to pall.
But the money he was receiving did not pall. It held him in leash,
silenced the doubts that troubled him now and then, kept him
temporizing with that uneasy thing we call conscience.
He climbed now into the cockpit, testing the controls absent-mindedly
while he pondered certain small incidents that caused him a certain
vague discomfort whenever he thought of them. For one thing, why must
a gatherer of news carry mysterious packages into Mexico and leave them
there, sometimes throwing them overboard with a tiny parachute
arrangement, as Cliff had done on the first trip, and flying back
without stopping? Why must a newspaper man bring back certain
mysterious packages, and straightway disappear with them in the car?
That he should confer long and secretly with men of florid complexions
and an accent which hardens its g's and sharpens its s's, might very
plausibly be a part of his gathering of legitimate news of
international import. Though Johnny rather doubted its legitimacy, he
had no doubt whatever of its world-wide importance. Certain nations
were at war--and he was no fool, once he stopped dreaming long enough
to think logically.
Those packages bothered him more than the florid gentlemen, however.
At first he suspected smuggling, or something like that. But
gun-running, that staple form of border lawbreaking, did not fit into
any part of Cliff's activities, though opium might. But when he had
made an excuse for handling one or two of the packages, they routed the
opium theory. They were flat and loosely solid, as packages of paper
would be. Not state documents such as melodramas use to keep the
villains sweating--they did not come in reams, so far as Johnny knew.
He could think of no other papers that would need smuggling into or out
of a country as free as ours where freedom of the press has become a
watchword; yet the idea persisted stubbornly that those were packages
of paper which he had managed to take in his hands.
As a pleasing relief from useless cogitation on the subject, Johnny
took his bank roll from a pocket he had sewed inside his shirt. Like a
miser he fingered the magic paper, counting and recounting, spending it
over and over in anticipatory daydreams. Thirty-two hundred dollars he
counted in bills of large denomination--impressively clean, crisp
bills, some of them--and mentally placed that amount to one side. That
would pay old Sudden, interest and all. What was left he could do with
as he pleased. He counted it again. There were three hundred dollars
left from what Bland had earned--Bland-- What had become of Bland,
anyway? Little runt might be broke again; in fact, it was practically
certain that he would be broke again, though he must have had close to
a hundred dollars when they landed in Los Angeles. Oh, well--forget
Bland!
So there were the three hundred--gee golly, but it had cost, that short
stay in the burg of Bland's dreams. A hundred dollars gone like the
puff of a cigarette! Well, there were the three hundred left--he'd
have been broke, pronto, if he had stayed there much longer. Another
hundred he had spent on the Thunder Bird--golly, but propellers do cost
a lot! And that shotgun he never had had a chance to shoot--Cliff sure
was a queer guy, making him buy all that scenery, and then caching him
away so no one ever got a chance to size him up and see whether he
looked like a duck hunter or not. Well, anyway, let's see. There were
a thousand in big juicy hundreds; and five hundred more in fifties and
twenties--
Out beyond the oak's leafy screen the dogs were barking and growling
and the children were calling shrilly. Johnny hastily put away his
wealth and eased himself up so that he could peer out through the
branches. He had not consciously feared the coming of strangers, yet
now he felt his heart thumping noisily because of the clamor out in the
yard. While he looked, two horsemen rode past and stopped at the cabin.
Now Johnny had been telling himself what a godsend some new face would
be to him, yet he did not rush out to welcome the callers and ask the
news of the outside world which Cliff was so chary of giving. He did
not by any sound or movement declare his presence. He simply craned
and listened.
One of the men he could not see because of a great, overhanging limb
that barred his vision. The other happened to stop just opposite a
very good peephole through the leaves. The kiddies were standing back
shyly, patently interrupted in their pretended play of trundling the
wheelbarrow and dragging the stick horses over the yard. Rosa, the
thin-legged girl, stood shyly back with her finger in her mouth, in
plain sight of Johnny, though she could not see him in the deep shadow
of the leaves.
It was the man that interested Johnny, however. He was a soldier,
probably one of the border patrol. He sat his horse easily, erect in
the saddle, straight-limbed and alert, with lean hard jaw and a gray
eye that kept glancing here, there, everywhere while the other talked.
It was only a profile view that Johnny saw, but he did not need a look
at the rest of his face with the other gray eye to be uncomfortably
convinced that not much would escape him.
"It circled and seemed to come down somewhere on this side the Potreros
and it has not been seen since. Ask the kids if they saw something
that looked like a big bird flying." This from the unseen one, who had
raised his voice as impatience seized him. These Mexicans were so
slow-witted!
Johnny heard Mateo's voice, speaking at length. He saw Rosa take her
finger from her mouth, catch up a corner of her ragged, apron and twist
it in an agony of confusion, and then as if suddenly comprehending what
it was these senores wished to know, she pointed jerkily toward the
north. Perhaps the others also pointed to the north, for the
lean-jawed soldier tilted his head backward and stared up that way, and
Mateo spoke in very fair English.
"The kids, she's see. No, I dunno. I'm busy I don' make attenshions.
I'm fine out when--"
"We know when," the efficient looking soldier interrupted. "You keep
watch. If you see it fly back, see just where it comes from and where
it goes, and ride like hell down to camp and tell us. You will get
more money than you can make here in a year. You sabe that?"
"Yo se, senor--me, I'm onderstan'."
"You know where our camp is?"
"Si, senor capitan. Me, I'm go lak hell."
"Well, there's nothing more to be got here. Let's get along." And as
they moved off Johnny caught a fragmentary phrase "from Riverside."
The children had taken up their industrious play again, and their
mother had turned from the open doorway to hush the crying of Mateo's
youngest in the cabin. Mateo called the children to him and patted
them on the head, and the senora, their mother, brought candy and gave
it to them. They ran off, sucking the sweets, gabbling gleefully to
one another. Cliff Lowell had been right, nothing is so disarming as a
woman and children about a place where secrets are kept.
There had been no suspicion of Mateo's cabin and the family that lived
there in squalid content. The incident was closed.
But Johnny slumped down in the seat again and glowered through the
little, curved windshield at the crisply wavering leaves beyond the
Thunder Bird's nose. He was not a fool, any more than he was a crook.
He was young and too confiding, too apt to take things for granted and
let the other fellow do the worrying, so long as things were fairly
pleasant for Johnny Jewel. But right now his eyes were open in more
senses than one, and they were very wide open at that.
There was something very radically wrong with this job. The fiction of
legitimate news gathering in Mexico could no longer give him any
feeling save disgust for his own culpability. News gathering did not
require armed guards--not in this country, at least--and such mysteries
as Cliff Lowell dealt in. The money in his possession ceased to give
him any little glow of pleasure. Instead, his face grew all at once
hot with shame and humiliation. It was not honest money, although he
had earned it honestly enough. If it had been honest money, why should
those soldiers go riding through the valleys, looking for him and his
plane? It was not for the pleasure of saying howdy, if Johnny might
judge from the hard-eyed glances of that one who had stopped in plain
view.
It was not honest money that he had been taking. Why, even the kids
out there knew it was not honest! Look at Rosa, playing shrewdly her
part of dumb shyness in the presence of strangers--and she thinking all
the while how best she could lie to them, the little imp! It was not
the first time she had shown her shrewdness. Why, nearly every time
Cliff wanted to make a trip across the line, those kids climbed the
hill to where they could look all over the flat and the near-by hills,
and if they saw any one they would yell down to Mateo. If the
interloper happened to be close, they had orders to roll small rocks
down for a warning, so Cliff one day told Johnny with that insufferably
tolerant smile. Cliff brought them candy and petted them, just for
what use he could make of them as watchdogs. Would all that be
necessary for a legitimate enterprise? Wouldn't the guards have orders
to shut their eyes when an airplane flew high, bearing a man who
gathered news vital to the government?
Once before Johnny had been made a fool of by horse thieves who plied
their trade across the line. They had given him this very same
airplane to keep him occupied and tempt him away from his duty while
they stole Rolling R horses at their leisure. Wasn't this very
money--thirty-two hundred dollars of it--going to pay for that bit of
gullibility? Gulled into earning money to pay for an earlier piece of
gross stupidity!
"The prize--mark!" he branded himself. "By golly, they've got me
helping 'em do worse than steal horses from the Rolling R, this time;
putting something over on the government is their little stunt--and by
golly, I fell for the bait just like I done the other time! _Huhn_!"
Then he added a hopeful threat. "But they had me on the hip, that
time--this time it's going to be different!"
For the rest of that day he brooded, waiting for Cliff. What he would
do he himself did not know, but he was absolutely determined that he
would do something.