the width of the place. Wide enough, plenty; he couldn't have ordered it
any better himself. From the mouth he started to step the depth, but
stopped when he had gone a third farther than the length of a military
type fuselage. He turned and looked back toward the entrance, his hands
on his hips, his eyes wide and glowing, his lips trembling and eager. He
looked up at the top; with cottonwood poles and brush he could roof it
against the sun and the winds. He looked at the fine, hard-packed sand
floor that the winds never stirred. He looked at the walls.
But he would put his luck to another test. He would abide by it--so he
told himself bravely. He felt in his pocket for a coin, pulled out a half
dollar, balanced it on his bent thumb and forefinger. He turned white
around the mouth, as he always did when deep emotion gripped him. He
hesitated. What if--? But if his luck was any good, it would hold. It had
to hold!
"Heads, I go. Tails, I stay." He muttered the fateful six words and
snapped his thumb up straight. The half dollar went spinning, clinked
against a high projection of rock, fell back to the sand floor.
Johnny stood where he was and stared at it. From where he was he could
not see which side was uppermost, and he was afraid to go and look. But
he had to look. He had to know, for he was still boy enough to feel
solemnly bound by the toss. He walked slowly toward it, stared hard--and
pounced like a kid after a hard-won marble.
"Heads, I go! That's the way I flipped 'er; it's a fair throw."
At the sound of his voice ringing in the confined space, Sandy lifted his
head and looked at Johnny tolerantly. Johnny came toward him grinning,
tossing the half-dollar and catching it, his steps springy. The last few
yards he took in a run, and vaulted into the saddle without touching the
stirrups at all. Even that did not seem to ease him quite. So he gave a
whoop that echoed and re-echoed from the rock walls and made Sandy squat,
lay back his ears, and shake his head violently.
At the mouth of the hidden nook Johnny turned to take a last, gloating
survey of the place in the deepening dusk. "She sure will make one bird
of a hangar!" he told Sandy glowingly. "Golly! Oh, good _golly_!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
FINDER, KEEPER
From the crest of a low, sandy ridge that had on it a giant cactus
standing with four spiney, knobbed fingers uplifted like a warning hand,
Johnny surveyed with wide, red-rimmed eyes the hidden basin that held his
heart's desire. Tomaso's brother sat his sweaty horse beside Johnny and
eyed both the gazer and the object of his gaze. A smile split whitely the
swarthiness of Tomaso's brother's face.
"She's settin' there jus' like I told," he pointed out with a wilted kind
of triumph, for the day was hot.
"Unh-hunh," Johnny conceded absent-mindedly. He was trying to make the
thing look real to him after all the visions he had had of it.
He had had his spells of doubting the probity of Tomaso's brother; of
secretly wondering whether the story of the plane might not be a ruse to
lure him away from Sinkhole. But then, how would Tomaso or his brother
know that Johnny would care anything about whether an airplane "sat" over
in Mexico within riding distance of the Border? Johnny did not think of
Tex as a possible factor in the proposition.
Well, there it was, anyway, not a quarter of a mile away. Between him and
the object of his quest the sand lay wrinkled in tiny drifts, with here
and there a ragged gray bush leaning forlornly from the wind. One wing of
the machine was tilted, as though it had careened a little in the winds,
but from that distance Johnny could not tell what damage had been done.
He kicked Sandy in the ribs and led the way down the hill. Tomaso's
brother, still grinning, followed close behind.
"It's going to be some sweet job getting the thing home," Johnny growled,
trying to disguise his excitement. "I expect I've had my trip for
nothing. She don't look to be in very good condition."
The grin of Tomaso's brother changed its expression a bit, but he did not
trouble to answer. Tomaso's brother knew far better than did Johnny all
the rules of commerce. Johnny's clumsy attempt to depreciate what he
wanted very much to buy merely convinced Tomaso's brother of the extreme
youthfulness of Johnny.
"Well, I might as well give her the once-over, now I'm here," Johnny
added with a fine air of indifference, and urged Sandy into a trot.
Now Sandy had discovered the secret hangar for Johnny without having the
slightest imagining of the use which Johnny hoped to make of it. That he
should ever have to face a thing like this was beyond his most fevered
imagination. He had been a tired, sweaty, head-hanging horse when he
started down the slope. He had trotted along with his half-closed eyes
on the ground before him, picking the smoothest path for his desert-weary
feet. He did not look up until Johnny pulled sharply on the reins and
gave a startling whoop built around the word "Whoa."
Sandy's bulging eyes got a full-front, close-up view of the "thing what
set." He saw a wicked nose with a feeler about twice as high as he was.
He saw great, terrible, outspread wings and a long slim body. It looked
poised, ready to come at him and snatch him with one frightful swoop, as
he had seen prairie hawks snatch little birds from the grass.
Sandy forgot that he was a tired, sweaty, head-hanging horse. He forgot
everything except the four unbroken legs under him. He wheeled half away
and went lunging up the far side of the little basin as if he felt the
horrible creature close behind him.
Johnny's mind had been so absorbed by the airplane that it took him a few
seconds to comprehend that Sandy was actually running away with him. It
took him a few seconds longer to realize that Sandy's jaw was set like
iron, with the bit gripped tight in his teeth. By the time he was
thoroughly convinced that Sandy was going to be hard to stop, Sandy had
topped the rise and was streaking it across an expanse of barrenness that
rose gently in spite of the fact that it looked perfectly level. A
sliding streak of gray dust rising into the heat waves marked his
passing.
Nearly a mile he ran before the slight grade and a rocky strip slowed him
down to a heavy gallop. Johnny had been in the mind to let the fool run
himself down just for punishment, but the rocks and an eagerness to
return to the stranded plane urged him to forego the discipline.
He stopped just where the scattered rocks ended abruptly in a wall that
rimmed a sunken, green valley, narrowing near where Johnny stood looking
down, but broadening farther along, and seeming to extend southward with
many twistings and windings. Johnny viewed the place with a passing
surprise, familiar though he was with the freakish topography of Arizona.
It was the greenness, and the little winding creek, and the huddle of
adobe buildings among the cottonwoods that struck him oddly. The creek
might be a continuation of Sinkhole Creek, that disappeared into the
sands away back there near his camp. There was nothing particularly
strange about that, or the green growth that water made possible wherever
the soil held latent fertility. It was the fact that those poor devils
who lost the airplane--and themselves--should have wandered on and on,
crazed with hunger and thirst when food and water and perhaps a guide
were to be found within a mile or so of where they landed.
It was a pity, thought Johnny. But, being very human, he also thought
that if the airmen had found this place, that plane would not be sitting
back there waiting his grave if inexpert inspection. So with his pity
cooled a little with self-interest, Johnny turned the puffing Sandy upon
the backward trail and followed his tracks across the apparently level
stretch of barrenness to the basin where waited the plane and Tomaso's
brother. Only for Sandy's tracks, Johnny knew he might have had a little
trouble in finding the place again, the country looked so unbroken and
monotonous.
However, he found it too soon for Sandy's comfort. There it sat--the
giant bird that had seemed ready to swoop and rise. But now its back was
turned toward him, and it did not look quite so fearsome. He circled and
plunged awhile, and even made shift to pitch a little, tired as he was.
But man's mastery prevailed, just as it had always done, and Sandy found
himself edging closer and closer to the thing. The horse of Tomaso's
brother, standing quiet in the very shade of a great wing, reassured him
further, so that presently he stood subdued but wall-eyed still, where
Johnny could dismount and hand the reins to the brother of Tomaso while
he examined the prize.
His manner was impressive, and the brother of Tomaso stopped grinning to
himself and began to look somewhat worried. He watched Johnny's face--and
I assure you that Johnny's face would have been worth any one's watching.
A cigarette slanted from the corner of his boyish lips, and the eye on
that side was squinted to keep out the smoke; which was merely an
impressive bit of byplay, because there was no smoke. The cigarette was
not burning, though Johnny had made a hasty dab at it with a lighted
match. The other eye was as coldly critical as was humanly possible when
the whole heart of Johnny was swelling with ecstasy. His head was tilted
a little, his hands were on his hips except when he used them to push and
test and try some reachable part.
Johnny thrust out a foot and gently kicked the flattened tire on one
wheel. "Umh-humh," he muttered to himself. "Flat tire." Never in his life
had Johnny enjoyed the privilege of kicking a wheel on the landing gear
of an airplane, but you would have thought that this was his business,
and that it bored him intensely to do so. He took one hand off his hip
long enough to lift the drooping wing that canted toward the south.
"Mhm-hmh--busted skid," he observed, in a tone which, to the brother of
Tomaso, shaved several dollars off the coveted fifty. Close behind Johnny
he stayed, following him around the plane in a secret agony of
apprehension.
Johnny, primed by the two rides he had taken--for a price--the fall
before, stepped nimbly up and straddled into the pilot's seat. He found
out, by actual experimentation, what wires tilted the ailerons, which
ones operated the elevators. "Mhm-hmh--dep control here," he commented;
whereupon the brother of Tomaso squirmed, thinking Johnny had discovered
a fatal flaw somewhere.
With one eye still squinted against cigarette smoke that did not rise,
Johnny climbed out and walked back along the fuselage to the tail.
"Mhm-hmh--I thought so!" he ejaculated, staring severely at the
elevators. "This is bad--pret-ty darn bad! They musta done a tail-slide
and pancaked. That's ba-ad." He removed the smokeless cigarette from his
lips, looked at it, felt for a match, and shook his head slowly while he
drew the match across a hot rock at his feet.
"Jus' broke little small," Tomaso's brother's voice came pleadingly from
behind Johnny. "You can feex him easy. She's fine airship, you bet!"
Johnny turned and looked at him pityingly. "Say, where do you get that
stuff?" he inquired. "A hell of a lot _you_ know about airships--bringing
me off down here to see _this_! Say! where's the fuselage at?" he
abruptly demanded.
Tomaso's brother gazed at the machine with tragic eyes. "Me, I'm seen it
here ontil this time I come," he declared virtuously. "I'm not touch
notheeng. That fuz'lawge, she's right here las' time I'm here. I'm not
touch notheeng but one little small hammer, one pliers. You find him up
there, I bet." Tomaso's brother pointed to the pilot's seat.
"Hunh! a lot you know about it!" snorted Johnny, and turned and walked
away to the other side of the machine where Tomaso's brother could not
see him grin.
"No matter what kind of a cheese you are, you must know an airplane can't
fly without a fuselage," he grumbled to the unhappy brother of Tomaso.
"Without that the plane's no good to me or anybody else. You better get
busy and hunt it up."
Tomaso's brother tied the horses to the nearest bush and got busy,
volubly protesting all the while that he had not touched a thing, and
that if Tomaso really had carried off the fuz'lawge, he would presently
make that young devil wish he had never been born.
"Maybe the aviators dropped it back there on the edge of the basin when
they were coming down," Johnny suggested, and laid himself down in the
shade of the plane to smoke and dream and gloat. He felt that he would
burst into insane and costly whoops if he attempted another minute's
repression. And he knew that Tomaso's brother would bleed him of his last
dollar if he guessed one half of Johnny's exultation; wherefore the ruse
to send Tomaso's brother off on a senseless quest.
"Oh, golly! Oh-h, good golly!" he murmured ecstatically, his eyes taking
in the full sweep of the great wings. "It's too good to be true. No, it
ain't; it's too good _not_ to be true! You wait. I'll show the Rolling R
bunch--you wait!"
He rolled to an elbow and looked back along the fuselage to the tail, his
eyes dwelling fondly on the clean lines of her, the perfect symmetry, the
glossy, unharmed covering. His glance went farther, to where the brother
of Tomaso plodded toward the basin's rim, peering here and there, pausing
to look under a bush, swerving to make sure the lost fuselage was not
behind a rock.
Johnny's grin widened. Presently it exploded into a laugh, which he
smothered with both hands clapped over his mouth. He writhed and
kicked and rolled in the sand. His round, blue eyes grew moist with the
tears of a boy's exuberant mirth. From behind his palms came muffled
_who-who-who-oo-oos_ of laughter.
He believed that he was laughing at the trick he had played on Tomaso's
brother. He was doing more than that: he was making up for all the sober
longing, for all the fears and the discouragements of his barren life.
There had been so much hoping and sighing and futile wishing--it had been
so long since Johnny Jewel had really laughed--and he was young, and
youth is the time of carefree laughter. Now nature was striking a balance
for him.
Tomaso's brother went up over the rim of the basin, disappeared, and then
came plodding back through the heat. Johnny had laughed all that while;
laughed until his sides were sore; until his eyes were red with the tears
he had shed; until he was so weak he staggered when he first crawled out
from under the plane and stood up. But it did him good, for all that, to
have laughed so hard and so long over an impish trick that came from the
boy in him.
"Me, I don't find him that damn fuz'lawge," said the brother of Tomaso,
wiping his swarthy countenance that was beaded with sweat. "That Tomaso,
he has took, I bet. He brings it to you queeck when I'm through with
him." He looked at Johnny expectantly. "I'm promise you it comes back
all right, if perhaps Tomaso has take. Perhaps now you pay twenty-fi'
dollar?"
"No, I don't; I pay you ten dollars now." Johnny, remember, had a full
two days' acquaintance with the brother of Tomaso. He was taking a
certain precaution, rather than an unfair advantage. He honestly believed
that the brother of Tomaso was best dealt with cautiously.
"When this airplane is safe at Sinkhole, and you've brought me every
darned thing that's been packed off, I'll pay you the rest of the fifty.
There's more," he added meaningly, "that's missing. The fuselage ain't
all."
The brother of Tomaso seemed unhappy. He took the ten dollars with a
sigh, promised himself much unpleasantness for Tomaso, and wearily set
about making camp, too dispirited to care that Johnny spent the time in
fussing around the machine, making a thin pretense of looking it over for
breakages and defects when all the while he was simply adoring it.
"At daybreak," Johnny announced with a new dignity in his voice--the
dignity of one having valuable possessions and a potential power--"we'll
start back. But I don't think much of your idea that we can drag this
machine home with our saddle horses. We can't--not and have anything but
a bundle of junk when we get there. There's a ranch over south here, a
mile or so. Better see if you can't get a wagon and team. We'll have to
haul it home somehow."
The brother of Tomaso started perceptibly. "A rancho? But that is not
possible, señor!"
"Oh, ain't it? I'll show yuh, then."
"Oh, no! _No importa._ If it is a rancho in this countree, me, I'm find
it without trobles for you."
Even Johnny's absorption in his treasure-trove could not altogether
blind him to the fact that Tomaso's brother was perturbed. He wondered
a little. But after all, there was only one thing now that really
interested him, and he straightway returned to it, leaving the Mexican
to find the ranch and hire a team. He was not afraid that the brother of
Tomaso would fail him in that detail. Thirty American dollars look big to
a Mexican.
He knew when Tomaso's brother mounted and rode away in the direction of
the ranch, and he knew when he returned. But he failed to observe that
the brother of Tomaso was gone long enough to have crawled there and back
on his hands and knees, and that he returned in a much better humor than
when he had left.
"The wagon and mules, it will come at daytime," was his brief report. He
crawled into his blankets and left Johnny perched up in the pilot's seat,
planning and dreaming in the moonlight. The brother of Tomaso lifted his
head once and looked at Johnny's head and shoulders, which was all of him
that showed. Through half-closed lids he studied Johnny's profile and the
look of exaltation in his wide-open eyes.
"Tex, he's one smart _hombre_," Tomaso's brother paid tribute. "The plan
it works aw-right, I bet."
CHAPTER EIGHT
OVER THE TELEPHONE
That night Johnny spread his blankets in a spot where he could lie and
look at his airplane with the moon shining full upon it and throwing a
shadow like a great, black bird with outstretched wings on the sand. He
had to lie where he could look at it, else he could not have lain there
at all. He was like a child that falls asleep with a new, long-coveted
toy clasped tight in its two hands. He worried himself into a headache
over the difficulties of transporting it unharmed over the miles of
untracked desert country to Sinkhole. He was afraid the mules would run
away with it, or upset it somehow. It looked so fragile, so easily
broken. Already the tail was broken, where the flyers in landing had
swerved against a rock. He pictured mishaps and disasters enough to fill
a journey of five times that length over country twice as rough. He
wished that he could fly it home. Picturing that, his lips softened into
a smile, and the pucker eased out of his forehead.
But he couldn't fly it. He didn't know how, though I honestly believe he
would have tried it anyway, had there been even a gallon of gasoline in
the tank. But the tank was bone dry, and the tail was knocked askew, so
Johnny had to give up thinking about it.
When he slept, the airplane filled his dreams so that he talked in his
sleep and wakened the brother of Tomaso, who sat up in his blankets to
listen.
"That plan, she's work fine, I bet!" grinned the brother of Tomaso when
Johnny had droned off into mumbling and then silence. "That Tex, she's
smart _hombre_." He laid himself down to sleep again.
Speaking of Tex; that same night he lay awake for a long while, staring
at the moon-lighted window and wishing that his eyesight could follow
his thoughts and show him what he wanted to see. His thoughts took the
trail to Sinkhole, dwelt there for a space in anxious speculation,
drifted on to the Border and beyond and sought out Johnny Jewel, dwelling
upon his quest with even more anxious speculation. Then, when sleep
had dulled somewhat his reasoning faculties, Tex began to vision himself
in Tucson--well, perhaps in Los Angeles, that Mecca of pleasure
lovers--spending money freely, living for a little while the life of ease
and idleness gemmed with the smiles of those beautiful women who hover
gaily around the money pots in any country, in any clime.
For a hard-working cowpuncher with no visible assets save his riding gear
and his skill with horses, the half-waking dreams of Tex were florid and
as impossible, in the cold light of reason, as had been the dreams of
Johnny Jewel in that bunk house.
That night others were awake in the moonlight. Down at Sinkhole camp five
or six riders were driving a bunch of Rolling R horses into the corral
where Johnny kept his riding horse overnight. They were not dreaming
vaguely of the future, these riders. Instead they were very much awake to
the present and the risks thereof. On the nearest ridge that gave an
outlook to the north, a sentinel was stationed in the shade of a rocky
out-cropping, ready to wheel and gallop back with a warning if any rode
that way.
When the horses were corralled and the gate closed, one man climbed upon
the fence and gave orders. This horse was to be turned outside--and the
gate-tender swung open the barrier to let it through. That horse could
go, and that and that.
"A dozen or so is about as many as we better take," he said to one who
worked near him. "No--turn that one back. I know--he's a good one, but
his mane and tail, and them white stockings behind, they're too easy
reco'nized. That long-legged bay, over there--he's got wind; look at the
chest on 'im! Forequarters like a lion. Haze him out, boys." He turned
himself on the fence and squinted over the bewildered little group of
freed horses. He swung back and squinted over the bunch in the corral,
weighing a delicate problem in his mind, to judge by the look of him.
"All right, boys. We kain't afford to be hawgs, this trip. Straddle your
hosses and take 'em over to that far corner where we laid the fence down.
Remember what I said about keepin' to the rocky draws. I'll wait here and
turn these loose, and foller along and set up the fence after yuh. And
keep agoin'--only don't swing over toward Baptista's place, mind. Keep to
the left all you can. And keep a lookout ahead. Yuh don't want that kid
to get a squint at yuh."
One answered him in Mexican while they slipped out and mounted. They rode
away, driving the horses they had chosen. Unobtrusive horses as to color;
bays and browns, mostly, of the commonplace type that would not easily be
missed from the herd. The man on the fence smoked a cigarette and studied
the horses milling restlessly below him in the corral.
From the adobe cabin squatting in the moonlight came the shrill,
insistent jingling of a bell. The man looked that way thoughtfully,
climbed down and went to the cabin, keeping carefully in the beaten
trail.
The door was not locked. A rawhide thong tied it fast to a staple in the
door jamb. With the bell shrilling its summons inside, the man paused
long enough to study the knotting of the thong before he untied it and
stepped inside. He went to the telephone slowly, thoughtfully, his
cigarette held between two fingers, his forehead drawn down so that
his eyebrows were pinched together. He hesitated perceptibly before he
took down the receiver. Then he grinned.
"Hello!" His voice was hoarse, slightly muffled. He grinned again when he
caught the mildly querulous tones of Sudden Selmer, sharpened a little by
the transmitter.
"Where the dickens have you been? I've been trying all evening to get
you," Sudden complained.
"Huh? Oh, I just got in. I been fixing fence over west of here. Took
me till dark--No, the stock's all in--wind had blowed down a couple of
them rotten posts--well, they was rotten enough to sag over, so I had to
reset them--Had to reset them, I said! Dig new holes!" He turned his face
a little away from the transmitter and coughed, then grinned while he
listened.
"Oh, nothing--just a cold I caught--Don't amount to anything. I'm
doctoring it. I always get hoarse when I catch a little cold--Sure,
everything's all right. I'm going to ride fence to-morrow--That so? It
blowed to beat the cars, down here all night--Why, they're lookin'
fine--No, ain't saw a soul. I guess they know better than to bother
our stock--All right, Mr. Selmer, I will--and say! I might be late in
getting in to-morrow, but everything's fine as silk--All right--G' bye!"