“Good golly!  Talk about luck!  Why, at a thousand dollars a week, I can pay old Sudden off in a month, doggone him.  And have a thousand to the good.  And if the job holds out for another month or two—­”

That, if you please, is how Johnny “thought it over and did some figuring!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ONE MORE PLUNGE FOR JOHNNY

The grinding clamor of passing street cars jarring over the Spring Street crossing woke Johnny to what he thought was moonlight, until it occurred to him that the pale glow must come from street lamps.  The air was muggy, filled with the odor of damp soot.  He sniffed, turned over with the bed covering rolled close around him, snuggled his cheek into a pillow, yawned, rooted deeper, opened his eyes again, and turned on the reading light by his bed.  It was five-thirty—­red dawn in Arizona where his dreaming had borne him swiftly to his old camp at Sinkhole.  Five-thirty would be getting-up time on the range, but in Los Angeles the hour seemed an ungodly time to crawl out of bed.  He reached for his “makings” and rolled a cigarette which he smoked with no more than one arm and his head exposed to the clamminess of the atmosphere.

He ought to return to the Thunder Bird by daylight, he mused, but he did not know how to get there.  He needed Bland for pilot, but he did not know where to find Bland.  Now that he came to consider finding people and places, it occurred to him that neither did he know where to find Cliff Lowell.  Thinking of him made Johnny wonder what kind of news gathering it was that could make it worth a thousand dollars a week to a man to have a swift, secret means of locomotion at his command.  It had sounded plausible enough last night, but now he was not so sure of it.  It might be some graft—­it might even be a scheme to rob him of his plane.  It would be a good idea to look into matters a little before he went any farther, he decided.  When Bland showed up, he’d go out and take a look at the Thunder Bird, and get her in shape to fly.  Then they’d get to work.  But a thousand dollars a week sure did sound good, and if the proposition was on the square—­

He snuggled down and began to build an air castle.  Suppose it was straight, and he went into the deal with Lowell; and suppose he worked for two months, say.  That would be eight—­well, say nine thousand, the way weeks lap over on the calendar.  Suppose by Christmas he had eight thousand dollars clear money. (Five hundred a month ought to run the plane, with any kind of luck.) Well, what if he took the Thunder Bird and his eight thousand, and flew back to the Rolling R and lit in the yard just about when they were sitting down to their Christmas dinner.  He’d walk in and lay three thousand dollars down on the table by old Sudden, and tell him kind of careless, “I happened to have a little extra cash on hand, so I thought I’d take up that note while I thought of it.  No use letting it go on drawing interest.”