The sheriff waved her off and spoke into the mouthpiece.  “Your girl, here, says she wants to say a few things . . .  What’s that? . . .  Oh.  All right, Mr. Selmer, you’re the doctor.”

He turned to Mary V with that exasperating chuckle of his.  “Your father says he’d rather not talk to you.  He says you can’t get married, because you’re under age, and you can’t marry without his consent.  So if I was you I’d just wait like a good girl and not make any trouble.  Your father is coming after you, and in the meantime I’ll take charge of you myself.”

“You will like hell,” gritted Johnny, and hit the sheriff on the jaw, sending him full tilt against the clerk, who fell over a chair so that the two sprawled on the floor.

For that, the third man, who was a deputy sheriff as it happened, grappled with Johnny from behind, and slipped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists.  The deadly finality of the smooth steel against his skin froze Johnny into a semblance of calm.  He stood white and very still until the deputy took him away down a corridor into another building and up a steep flight of dirty stairs to a barren, sweltering little room under the roof.

Baffled, stunned with the humiliation of his plight, he had not even spoken a good-by to Mary V, who had looked upon him strangely when he stood manacled before her.

“Now you’ve made a nice mess of things!” she had exclaimed, half crying.  And Johnny had inwardly agreed with her more sweepingly than Mary V suspected.  A nice mess he had made of things, truly!  Everything was a muddle, and like the fool he was, he went right on muddling things worse.  Even Mary V could see it, he told himself bitterly, and forgot that Mary V had said other things,—­tender, pitying things,—­before they had led him away from her.

He had no delusions regarding the seriousness of his plight.  Assaulting an officer was a madness he should have avoided above all else, and because he had yielded to that madness he expected to pay more dearly than he was paying old Sudden for his folly of the early summer.  It seemed to him that the rest of his life would be spent in paying for his own blunders.  It was like a nightmare that held him struggling futilely to attain some vital object; for how could he ever hope to achieve great things if he were forever atoning for past mistakes?

Now, instead of earning money wherewith to pay his debt to Sudden, he would be sweltering indefinitely in jail.  And when they did finally turn him loose, Mary V would be ashamed of her jailbird sweetheart, and his airplane would be—­where?

He thought of Bland, having things his own way with the plane.  Dissipated, dishonest, with an instinct for petty graft—­Johnny would be helpless, caged there under the roof of their jail while Bland made free with his property.  It did not occur to him that that he could call the law to his aid and have the airplane stored safe from Bland’s pilfering fingers.  That little gleam of brightness could not penetrate his gloom; for, once Johnny’s indomitable optimism failed him, he fell deep indeed into the black pit of despair.