Chapter 6 - Page 2

you bet. Me, I don't know damn t'ing about flyin' nothin' but monee. Monee, I make it fly, yes." He chuckled at his little joke, but Johnny did not even hear it.

Johnny was seeing a real, military airplane in his possession, cached away in some niche in the lava wall to the west of Sinkhole--a wall that featured queer niches and caverns and clefts. He was seeing--what wonderful things was Johnny not seeing?

"Like them buried treasure," Tomaso's brother went on purring comfortably to Johnny's doubts. "The hombre what finds, it belongs to him, you bet. What you say? You pay me--" The eyes of Tomaso's brother dwelt calculatingly upon Johnny's half-averted face. "You pay me fifty dollar when I show you I don't lie. I help you drag him back home, you--"

"Nothing doing." Johnny pulled himself from his dreams to bargain for his heart's desire--because he knew Mexicans. "I ain't sure I want the thing, anyway. It's probably broke, and it takes money to fix a busted plane, let me tell you. And there might be complications; and besides, I've got to ride this range. I can't go rambling around all over Mexico hunting an airplane that probably wouldn't be any good when I found it."

Tomaso's brother rose from the doorsill to gesticulate while he argued those points and others which Johnny thought of later. It was a beautiful flying machine. By every object impressive enough to make oath upon, Tomaso's brother swore that it was as he said. Look! Not one peso would he accept until Johnny had seen. And the range? Would it run off in two days, perhaps? Look, then! Tomaso's brother would make the bet. He would agree. They would go for the airship, and they would return with it, and of the fifty pesos that was the full price he asked, not one centavo would he accept until the señor had seen that all was as he had left it. Look! That very night they would go, and by noon to-morrow they would be there. And under the great wings would they rest. And they would return in two more days--such a little while it would take--

Johnny's jaw lengthened. Making due allowance for the lying tongue of Tomaso's brother, it would take a week to get the thing home. And that would mean that Johnny would have no job when he returned; which would mean that he would have no fifty dollars a month coming in; which would mean that he would be broke and would have to hunt another job. And you couldn't pack a government airplane around under your arm. Not once did it occur to Johnny that he might sell it for more money than he had ever possessed in his life, for more than what a full course in aviation would cost him. As his own precious plane he saw it. His to keep. His to fly, his to worship--but never to sell.

He looked away to the southward where the land stretched gray and dreary to the low skyline broken here and there with the pale outline of distant hills. A