Mary V laughed and gave her mother a bear-hug.  Mommie was a plump matron, and the idea of her loping across the desert with her hands over her ears was funny.  “You do have tremendously sensible ideas, mommie, though you simply do not understand Johnny as I do.  I am perfectly positive that he would not disappoint me.  However, I’ll just make sure when he started.  I’m so afraid of some horrible accident—­”

“Well, you ’phone first, before you begin to borrow trouble,” her mother advised her shrewdly.  “I know if you had laid down the law to me the way you did to Johnny, I’d stay away if it was the last thing I did on earth.  And Johnny—­”

Mary V called Tucson again, and mommie subsided so as not to interrupt.  There was a delay while the hotel clerk obligingly sent a boy over to where Johnny kept his airplane.  While she waited for his ring, Mary V went restlessly out to watch the sky toward Tucson.  Half an hour slipped away.  Mary V was just declaring pettishly that she could walk to Tucson and find out, while she waited for that idiotic clerk, when he called her.  Mary V listened, hung up the receiver with trembling fingers, and went to find her mother in the kitchen.

“Mommie, the plane is gone, and they are almost sure he went last night, because he was seen going that way after he left the hotel.  So he did start, just as I told him to do—­and something awful has happened to him—­and where’s dad?”

Mary V’s father, whom men for some unaccountable reason called “Sudden” when he was not present, crawled out from under the rear end of his battered touring car when Mary V’s moccasins and the fluttering hem of blue kimono moved within his range of vision.  Sudden’s face was smudged with black grease and the dust of the desert, and in his hand was a crescent wrench worn shiny where it had nipped nuts and bolts.

“You musta done some fancy driving the other day,” he greeted his anxious-faced daughter.  “Didn’t you know you was sliding a wheel every time you threw on the brake?  Wonder to me is you didn’t skid off a grade somewhere!” He hitched himself into a new and uncomfortable pose and set the wrench on a nut, screwing his well-fed face into an agonized grimace while he put his full strength into the turn.  “If I could find a man that I’d trust my life with on these roads, I’d have me a chauffeur,” he grumbled for the millionth time.  “That reformed blacksmith musta welded these nuts on to the bolts,” he added, and muttered something savage when the wrench slipped and he barked a knuckle.  “Well, what yuh want?  Go ahead and have it, or do it—­only don’t stand watching me when I’m trying to—­” He gritted his teeth, threw the wrench away and picked up another.  “Go ask your mother,” he exclaimed.  “Tell her I’ll let you if she will.”