Chapter 25 - Page 2

door, smiling a little.

Bud had just finished eating, and was rolling a cigarette before he got up from the long table. The others were finishing their coffee and hot biscuits, and they said hello to Mary V and went on undisturbed.

"Hello--what's all that racket I heard as I was getting up?" Mary V inquired lightly. "My good gracious, I thought you boys had started a sawmill--or maybe somebody had overslept down here and was snoring. It sounded like Aleck."

They laughed, and Curley spoke. "That there was Skyrider. He has flew--"

Bud, fumbling for a match, had a fit of genius. He grinned, cleared his throat, and began to warble unexpectedly.

"Skyrider-r has flew into-o the blew Ta-da, da-da, da-daa-a-a-- No-obody knew what he aimed to do Till he went and said adieu.

"Says he, 'Good-bye, I aim to fly To foreign lands, ta da-a--'"

"Oh, for gracious sake, Bud! I always knew you were queer at times, but I really didn't know you had fits. So it was Skyrider riding off to call on Venus, was it? I wish I had seen him start; but that's just my luck, of course. Er--where was he going? Or didn't he say?"

"He didn't say. But he shook hands with us and told us we had treated him white at times, and that some day he'd write--"

"Oh, say! I got a letter he left for your father," Curley broke in. "I'll git it and you can take it up to the house." He gave Mary V a mysterious look and went into the room where he slept.

Mary V followed him as far as the door, and saw Curley take two letters from under his pillow. Her heart gave a jump at that, and it began to beat very fast when he turned and put them into her hand with another mysterious look. She thanked him and hurried out on the porch and straight to her pet ledge. Her dad's letter could wait.

On the ledge she sat down, and with fingers that shook she tore open, an envelope addressed to "Miss Mary V. Selmer, care of Curley." It had been sealed very tightly, as though it contained secrets. Which it did.

Mary V read that letter through from beginning to end five times before she left the ledge. It was not exactly a love letter, either, though Mary V squeezed it between her palms and then kissed it before she put it away out of sight. After that she cried lonesomely and stared away into that part of the sky where Johnny and his airplane had last been a disappearing speck.

"Dear Mary V," (Johnny had written) "I'm not going to tell anybody good-bye. Not even you, or I might say especially not you. It's hard enough to go as it is.

"Maybe you won't care much, but I am a hopeful cuss, and I'm going to build air castles about you till I come back, which I hope to do when I have made good. I made an awful mess of things here, and it's up to me to make good now