Half an hour he spent, fingering those bank notes, gloating over them, wondering what Mary V would say if she knew he had them, wishing he had another fifteen hundred, so he could pay old Sudden and be done with it.  An unpleasant thought came to him and nagged at him, though he tried to push it from him; the thought that it would be Sudden’s security that he would be risking—­that the Thunder Bird was not really his until he had paid that note.

The thought troubled him.  He got up and moved restlessly along the base of the towering rock, when something whined past his ear and spatted against a bowlder beyond.  Johnny did not think; he acted instinctively, dropping as though he had been shot and lying there until he had time to plan his next move.  He had not been raised in gun smoke, but nevertheless he knew a bullet when he heard it, and he did not think himself conceited when he believed this particular bullet had been presented to him.  Why?

On his stomach he inched down out of range unless the shooter moved his position, and then, impelled by a keen desire to know for sure, he adopted the old, old trick of sending his hat scouting for him.  A dead bush near by furnished the necessary stick, and the steep slope gave him shelter while he tested the real purpose of the man who had shot.  It might be just a hunter, of course—­only this was a poor place for hunting anything but one inoffensive young flyer who meant harm to no one.  He put his hat on the stick, pushed the stick slowly up past a rock, and tried to make the hat act as though its owner was crawling laboriously to some fancied shelter.

For a minute or two the hat crawled unmolested.  Then, pang-g came another bullet and bored a neat, brown-rimmed hole through the uphill side of the hat, and tore a ragged hole on its way out through the downhill side.  Johnny let the hat slide down to him, looked at the holes with widening eyes, said “Good gosh!” just under his breath, and hitched himself farther down the slope.

His curiosity was satisfied; he had seen all of the country he needed to see and there was nothing to stay for, anyway.  When he reached. the patient sorrel pony a minute or two later (it had taken him half an hour or more to climb from the pony to the peak, but climbing, of course, is much slower than coming down—­even without the acceleration of singing rifle bullets) he was perspiring rather freely and puffing a little.

For a time he waited there under the shelf of rock.  But he heard no sound from above, and in a little while he led the pony down the other way, which brought him to the valley near a small pasture which was evidently the pony’s home, judging from the way he kept pulling in that direction.  Johnny turned the horse in and closed the gate, setting the old saddle astride it with the bridle hanging over the horn.  He did not care for further exploration, thank you.