“Now as to credentials, you will do me a favor if you look me up.  As to yourself, I know all about you, thanks to that adventurous spirit which brought you into the limelight and is really of tremendous value to me.  Seriously now, as a sporting proposition and a chance to make money, how does it strike you?”

“Why—­it looks all right, on the face of it.”  Johnny was trying to be extremely cautious.  “I’ll have to think it over, though.  For one thing, I’ll want to do some figuring before I can say whether the price is right.  It costs money to keep an airplane in the air, Mr. Lowell.  You’d be surprised to see just how much a fellow has to pay out to keep a motor in good mechanical shape.  And, of course, I wouldn’t look at it at any price unless I was dead sure it was straight.  If you’ll excuse my saying so, I ain’t after dirty money.  It’s got to be clean.”

“That’s the stuff!  I’m glad to hear you come right out and say so, because that’s where I stand.  I want you to look me up.  Here’s the card of the International News Syndicate—­they handle nothing but big political stuff, you understand.  A sort of secret service of newspaperdom.  Ask them about me and about the proposition.  They’ll be paying you the money—­not me.  Ask any one else you like, only don’t mention this particular matter we’ve been discussing.  As the lawyers say, secrecy is the essence of this contract.”  He laughed and crooked a finger at the waiter who had served them so assiduously, got his dinner check and paid it with a banknote that, even deducting the high cost of eating in a regular place, returned him a handful of change.  He tipped the waiter generously and rose.

“You’d have to keep under cover as much as possible,” he continued planning, when they were again on the street.  “How much attention did you attract, Mr. Jewel, when you landed?”

“Why, not any.  It was about dark, and we lit in a beanfield over beyond Inglewood.  We left the plane there and came in on a street car.  I don’t guess anybody saw us at all.”

“Fine!  This is playing our way from the start.  If any one notices your name on the hotel register and asks you questions, you came after certain parts for your motor—­any errand will do—­and you expect to leave again at any time.  This does not commit you to the proposition, Mr. Jewel.  It is merely keeping our lines straight in case you do accept.  I want you to sleep on it—­but please don’t talk in your sleep!” He laughed, and Johnny laughed with him and promised discretion.

The last he saw of Cliff Lowell that night, Cliff was talking with a group of important-looking men who treated him as though they had known him for a long, long while.  Their manifest intimacy struck Johnny as a tacit endorsement of Cliff’s character and reputation.  It would seem almost an insult to go around quizzing people about a man so popular with the leading citizens, Johnny told himself.  He would think the proposition over, certainly.  He was not fool enough to jump headfirst into a thing like that at the first crook of a stranger’s finger, but—­