“So he put me in touch with parties that could furnish this.” This was a large photographic bird’s-eye map of a country which looked very much like Arizona, or the wild places anywhere next the Mexican borderline.  “Where I got it I am not at liberty to say.  It’s a practice map—­done for the training in aerial photography that is essential nowadays in warfare.  The government is going in rather strong on that sort of thing.  This is authentic.  Take a good look at it through this glass and tell me what you think of it.  Can you see any place that would make a possible secret landing for an airplane, for instance?”

“Golly!” Johnny whispered, as Cliff’s meaning flashed clean-cut through the last sentence.  He studied the photograph with pursed lips, his left eye squinted that his right eye might peer through a small reading glass.  “It would depend on the ground,” he answered after a minute.  “I’d want to fly over it before I could tell exactly.  If it was soft sandy for instance—­” (Bland would have snickered at that, knowing what reason Johnny had for realizing the disadvantages of soft sand as a landing place.) “But the topography looks very practicable for the purpose.” (Nothing like talking up to your audience.  Johnny was proud of that sentence.)

“All right.  We’ll lay that aside for further investigation.  I’m glad you have the plane out here away from every one.  We’ll take a run over to that locality in my car—­it’s open season for ducks, and there’s that lake you see on the map.  A couple of shotguns and our hunting licenses will be all the alibi we’ll need.  You must know how to get about in the open country, living in Arizona as you have, and I’m counting a good deal on that.  That’s one reason why I made you the offer, instead of these flyers around here—­and by the way, that’s one point that made you look like a safe bet to the old man.

“I was talking to him about salary, and he’s willing to go stronger than I said, if you make good.  He said it would be worth about two hundred a day, which is considerably better than the thousand a week that I named.”

Cliff knew when to stop and let the bait dangle.  He fussed with a fresh cigarette, paying no apparent attention to Johnny, which gave that young man an idea that he was wholly unobserved while he dizzily made a mental calculation.  Fourteen hundred a week—­go-od golly!  In a month—­or would it last for a month?

“How long a job is this?” he demanded so suddenly that the words were out before he knew he was going to ask the question.

“How long?  Well—­that’s hard to say.  Until you fail to put me across the line safely, I suppose.  There’s always something doing or going to be done in Mexico, old man—­and it’s always worth reporting to the Syndicate.  How long will people go on reading their morning paper at breakfast?” He smiled the tolerant, bored smile that Johnny associated with his first sight of Cliff.  “I should say the job will last as long as you make good.”