Johnny rattled the hook impatiently, called hello with irritated insistence, and finally succeeded in raising Central’s impersonal:  “Number, please?” Whereupon he flung himself angrily out of the booth.

“Do you want to pay at this end?” The girl at the desk looked up at him with a gleam of curiosity.  Mentally Johnny accused her of “listening in.”  He snapped an affirmative at her and waited until “long distance” told her the amount.

“Four dollars and eighty-five cents,” she announced, giving him a pert little smile.  Johnny flipped a small gold piece to the desk and marched off, scorning his fifteen cents change with the air of a millionaire.

Johnny was angry, grieved, disappointed, worried—­and would have been wholly miserable had not his anger so dominated his other emotions that he could continue mentally his argument against the attitude of Mary V and the Rolling R.

They refused to take him seriously, which hurt Johnny’s self-esteem terribly.  Were he older, were he a property owner, Sudden Selmer would not so lightly wave aside that debt.  He would pay Johnny the respect of fighting for his just rights.  But no—­just because he was barely of age, just because he was Johnny Jewel, they all acted as though—­why, darn ’em, they acted as though he was a kid offering to earn money to pay for a broken plate!  And Mary V—­

Well, Mary V was a great little girl, but she would have to learn some day that Johnny was master.  He considered this as good a day as any for the lesson.  Better, because he was really upholding his principles by not going to the ranch meekly submissive, because Mary V had announced that she would be looking for him.  Johnny winced from the thought of Mary V, out on the porch, watching the sky toward Tucson for the black speck that would be his airplane; listening for the high, strident drone that would herald his coming.  She would cry herself to sleep.

But she had deliberately sentenced herself to tears and disappointment, he told himself sternly.  She must have known he was in earnest about not coming.  She had no right to think she could kid him out of something big and vital to his honor.  She ought to know him by this time.

Briefly he considered returning to the hotel and calling up the ranch, just to tell her not to look for him because he was not coming.  But the small matter of paying the toll deterred him.  It was humiliating to admit, even to himself, that he could not afford another long-distance conversation with Mary V, but he had come to the point in his finances where a two-bit piece looked large as a dollar.  He would miss that small gold piece.

Since the government had refused to consider accepting his services and paying him a bonus for his plane, he would have to sell it—­if he could.

There it sat, reared up on its two little wheels, its nose poked rakishly out of an old shed that had been remodelled to accommodate it, its tail sticking out at the other side so that it slightly resembled a turtle with its shell not quite covering its extremities.  The Mexican boy whom Johnny had hired to watch the plane in his absence lay asleep under one wing.  A faint odor of varnish testified to the heat of the day that was waning toward a sultry night.