Chapter 6 - Page 2

nightmare would end and she would wake up and find life just as it had always been, with Johnny alive and full of fun and ready to argue with her over every little thing. It seemed grotesquely impossible that her own innocent command that he come to her should result in all this horror.

Upheld at first by a frenzied hope that they should find him, she now dreaded the finding, and refused to reckon the time since she had last heard his voice over the telephone. Hurt and without water or food on the desert in all that heat--she set her teeth to stifle a groan. A little while ago when he had been so sure that he could enlist as a flyer, she had shrunk from the thought of his going to war. Before that, when he had lain unconscious for so many days there in the bedroom behind her; when a trained nurse had stood guard and would not let Mary V so much as look at Johnny, and the doctor had spoken glibly of hope, when his eyes told her how little hope there was, she had suffered terribly. She had thought that she had touched the depths of worry over Johnny--and she had not begun to know the meaning of the word.

She lay a small, huddled heap of heartache, shrinking from her own thoughts, shrinking from the sight of every one, dazed with terror of what she might hear if any one spoke. Into this nightmare jingled the telephone bell. Mary V gave a faint scream and put her hands over her ears.

"There, there, baby--I'll answer it," her mother's voice came soothingly, and Mary V shrank farther down in the hammock cushions.

"Oh--why--land alive! Just a minute--hold the line," she heard her mother say in a strange, flustered voice. Then she called, "Mary V--I guess you better come and--"

"Oh, I--can't, mommie! I'll go crazy if I have to hear--"

"There, there, baby, it's something you want to hear!"

Mary V's knees shook under her as she went to the telephone. Her voice was pinched and feeble when she tried to call the stereotyped hello.

"Oh, hello, Mary V. That you? I just got in, and I thought I'd better call up. I hear they're out looking for me--"

Mary V's eyes turned glassy. She made a faint sound and drooped forward until her forehead rested on the table. The receiver slid soundlessly into her lap and lay there while Johnny Jewel rattled on hurriedly.

"--And so after that happened, we were held up till dark getting the landing gear straightened out. And of course we couldn't fly very well after dark. And then next morning, after Bland had cleaned out the carburetor--say, it was straight mud in there and the screen was packed solid, so of course she didn't get gas half the time, and that's what ailed her--and when we did start, or was going to start, we found out there wasn't enough gas in the tank to take us home. So I had to catch an Injun and make him take a note to the nearest station for