Without disturbing the boy Johnny rolled a smoke and stood, as he had stood many and many a time, staring at his prize and wondering what to do with it.  He had to have money.  That was flat, final, admitting no argument.  At a reasonable estimate, three thousand dollars were tied up in that machine.  He could not afford to sell it for any less.  Yet there did not seem to be a man in the country willing to pay three thousand dollars for it.  It was a curiosity, a thing to come out and stare at, a thing to admire; but not to buy, even though Johnny had as an added inducement offered to teach the buyer to fly before the purchase price was taken from the bank.

The stalking shadow of a man moving slowly warned Johnny of an approaching visitor.  He did not trouble to turn his head; he even moved farther into the shed, to tighten a turnbuckle that was letting a cable sag a little.

“Hello, old top—­how they using yuh?” greeted a voice that had in it a familiar, whining note.

Johnny’s muscles stiffened.  Hostility, suspicion, surprise surged confusingly through his brain.  He turned as one who was bracing himself to meet an enemy, with a primitive prickling where the bristles used to rise on the necks of our cavemen ancestors.

CHAPTER TWO

AND THE CAT CAME BACK

“Why, hello, Bland,” Johnny exclaimed after the first blank silence.  “I thought you was tied up in a sack and throwed into the pond long ago!”

The visitor grinned with a sour droop to his mouth, a droop which Johnny knew of old.  “But the cat came back,” he followed the simile, blinking at Johnny with his pale, opaque blue eyes.  “What yuh doing here?  Starting an aviation school?”

“Yeah.  Free instruction.  Want a lesson?” Johnny retorted, only half the sarcasm intended for Bland; the rest going to the town that had failed to disgorge a buyer for what he had to sell.

“Aw, I suppose you think you could give me lessons, now you’ve learned to do a little straightaway flying without landing on your tail,” Bland fleered, with the impatience of the seasoned flyer for the novice who thinks well of himself and his newly acquired skill.  “Say, that was some bump you give yourself on the dome when we lit over there in that sand patch.  I tried to tell yuh that sand looked loose—­”

“Yes, you did—­not!  You was scared stiff.  Your face looked like the inside of a raw bacon rind!”

“Sure, I was scared.  So would you of been if you’d a known as much about it as I knew.  I knew we was due to pile up, when you grabbed the control away from me.  You’ll make a flyer, all right—­and a good one, if yuh last long enough.  But you can’t learn it all in a day, bo—­take it from me.  Anyway, I got no kick to make.  It was you and the plane that got the bumps.  All I done was bite my tongue half off!”

Boy that he was, Johnny laughed over this.  The idea of Bland biting his tongue tickled him and served to blur his antagonism for the tricky aviator who had played so large a part in his salvaging of this very airplane.