“Stay where you are,” he called.  “Can you hear me?”

Mateo nodded emphatically.

“All right.  Take your gun and start off across the flat, down the way Cliff will come.  Act like you didn’t want to be seen.  There’s somebody across on the hill, up here, and I want to see if he’ll follow you.  You get me?”

“Si, yes.  I’m go.”

“After awhile you can come back.  If you see Cliff, tell him he’s after ducks.  Sabe?”

“Yo se.  I’m onderstan’.”

“All right.  Go back in the house and come out the front door and start off.”

Mateo waved his hand and disappeared.  In five minutes or less Johnny saw him walking away from the cabin and glancing frequently at the hills upon either hand.  His manner might have been called stealthy, if one were looking for stealth.  Johnny was looking for something else, and presently he gave a grunt of satisfaction.  The object behind the rock stood up and levelled his glasses at Mateo.  Johnny waited until he was sure and then scrambled down to the protection of another bowlder.  He peered from there up the valley and after some searching discovered his man working carefully along a side hill, evidently anxious to keep Mateo in sight.  Johnny worked down another rod or two, reconnoitered again, made another sliding run for it, and stopped behind a clump of brush.  In that way he reached the shelter of the oak, feeling certain that he had not been seen.

Through the screen of branches he looked out across the little valley, but he could not see any one at all, not even Mateo.  So he turned to his one solace, The Thunder Bird, and dusted it as carefully as a young girl dusts her new piano.  With a handful of waste he went over the motor, wiping it until it shone wherever shining was possible, and tried not to think of the man on the hillside.  That was Cliff’s affair—­until Johnny was ready to make the affair his.

“I wish I knew just what he’s up to,” Johnny fretted.  “If I just knew something!  I’d look like a boob now, wouldn’t I, if the guards nabbed us?  They might try to pin most anything on me, and I wouldn’t have any comeback.  It don’t look good, if anybody asks me!  And if they—­”

“Man’s come here,” Rosa announced close behind him in a tense whisper.  “Walking.”

Johnny jumped and went on his toes to a spot where he could look through the foliage.

“Walking down,” explained Rosa, and waved a skinny hand toward the hill behind them.

“Did you see him?”

“No, senor.  I’m seeing rocks falling where somebody walks down.”

There was nothing to do but wait.  Johnny pushed the girl toward the cabin and saw her scramble under the lowest branches and join the others unconcernedly, tagging the boy Josef, and, then running off into the open—­where she could see the hillside—­with Josef running after.  She did not seem to be watching the hill, while she was apparently absorbed in dodging Josef, but Johnny gathered from her gestures that the man was still coming and that he was making for the cabin.  He was wondering what she meant by suddenly sinking to the ground in shrill laughter, when he heard a step behind him.  He whirled, startled, his hand jerking back toward the gun he wore.