It pleased Johnny that Bland seemed to take it as a matter of course that he should occupy the front seat.  The last time they had flown together, Bland had occupied it perforce, with Johnny and two guns behind him.  After all, Johnny reflected, he would not have been so suspicious of Bland if Mary V had not influenced him.  And every one knows that girls take notions with very little reason for the foundation.  Bland was a bum, but the little cuss seemed to want to make good, and a man would be pretty poor stuff that wouldn’t help a fellow reform.

With that comfortable readjustment of his mental attitude toward the birdman, Johnny strapped himself in, pulled down his goggles while Bland eased in the motor.  He saw Bland glance to right and left with the old vigilance.  He felt the testing of controls, the unconscious tensing of nerves for the start.  They raced down the calf pasture, nosed upward and went whirring away from a dwindling earth, straight toward the heart of the dawn.

It was like drinking of some heady wine that blurs one’s troubles and pushes them far down over the horizon.  Johnny forgot that he had problems to solve or worries that nagged at him incessantly.  He forgot that Mary V, away off there to the southwest, had probably cried herself to sleep the night before because he had disappointed her.  He was flying up and away from all that.  He was soaring free as a bird, and the rush of a strong, clean wind was in his face.  The roar of the motor was a great, throbbing harmony in his ears.  For a little while the world would hold nothing else.

They were climbing, climbing, writing an invisible spiral in the air.  Bland half turned his head, and Johnny caught his meaning with telepathic keenness.  They were going to loop, and Bland wanted him to yield the control and to watch closely how the thing was done.

They swooped like a hawk that has seen a meadow mouse amongst the grass.  They climbed steeply, swung clean over, so that the earth was oddly slipping past far above their heads; swung down, flattened out and flew straight.  It was glorious.

A second time Bland looped, and yet again.  It was exactly as Johnny had known it would be.  He who had flown so long in his day-dreaming, who had performed wonderful acrobatics in his imagination, felt the sensation old, accustomed, milder even than in his dreams.

Once more, and he did the loop himself, hardly conscious of Bland’s presence.  Bland turned his head, signalling, and did a flop, righted, and was flying straight in the opposite direction.  Again, and flew southeast by the sun.  They practised that manoeuver again and again before Johnny felt fairly sure of himself, but once he did it he was one proud young man!

All this while the familiar landmarks were slipping behind them.  Tucson was out of sight, had they thought to look for it.  And all this while the sturdy motor was humming its song of force triumphant.  Subsequently it stuttered faintly in expressing itself.  Triumph was there, but it was not so joyously sure of itself.  Bland glided, cocking an anxious ear to listen while he slowed the motor.  It was there, the stutter—­more pronounced than before; and once that pulsing power begins to flag a little and grow uncertain, there is but one thing to do.