They glided another ten miles or so before Bland picked a spot that looked safe for landing.  They had one ill-chosen landing still vivid in their memory, and Johnny carried a long, white scar along the side of his head and a tenderness of the scalp to assist him in remembering.

Wherefore they came down circumspectly in a flat little field beside a flat little stream, with a huddle of flat dwellings drawn back shyly behind a thin group of willows.  They came down gently, bouncing toward the willows as though they meant to drive up to the very doorway of the nearest hut.  As they came on, their great wings out-spread rigidly, the propeller whirring at slackened speed, the motor sputtering unevenly, the doorway spewed forth three fat squaws and some naked papooses who fled shrieking into the brush behind the willows.

CHAPTER FOUR

MARY V TO THE RESCUE

Mary V Selmer was a young woman of quick impulses, a complete disdain for consequences as yet unseen, and a disposition to have her own way, to override obstacles man-made or sent by fate to thwart her desires.  Ask any man on the Rolling R Ranch, where Mary V was born; they will bear witness that this is true.

Mary V had fired the first gun in the battle of wills.  She had told Johnny Jewel that she would expect him to fly straight to the ranch—­if Johnny loved her.  Mary V did not mean to seem dictatorial; she merely wanted Johnny to come back to the Rolling R, and she took what seemed to her to be the surest means of bringing him.  So, serenely sure of Johnny’s love, she had no misgivings when the sun went down and those wonderful, opal tints of the afterglow filled all the sky.

Johnny would be hungry, of course.  She wheedled Bedelia, the cook, into letting her keep the veal roast hot in the oven of the gasoline range.  She herself spread one of mommie’s cherished lunch cloths on Bedelia’s little square table in the kitchen alcove, where she and Johnny could be alone while he ate.  She dipped generously into the newest preserves and filled a glass dish full for him.  She raided the great refrigerator, closing her eyes to the morrow’s reckoning.  Johnny would be hungry, Johnny was a sort of prodigal, and the fatted calf should be killed figuratively and the ring placed upon his finger.

She told her mommie and her dad that Johnny was coming, and that everything was all right, and Johnny would be sensible and settle down now, because he was not going to enlist after all.  She kissed them both and flew back to the kitchen because she had thought of something else that Johnny would like to eat.

This, you must understand, was while Johnny was feeding Bland,—­and himself,—­in “Red’s Quick Lunch”, and worrying because Bland tactlessly chose such expensive fare as T-bone steak and French fried.  She was out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson and looking rather wistful, while Johnny was generously sorting out clothes for Bland and insisting upon the bath and the change before Bland should sleep in Johnny’s bed.  Mary V, you will observe, had no telepathic sense at all.