Johnny sat on the edge of the dresser smoking and fanning the smoke away from his round, meditative eyes while he looked Bland over.  Bland caught the look, and in spite of the shoes he grinned amiably.

“I take it back, bo, what I said about gratitude.  You got it, after all.”

“Huh!” Johnny grunted.  “Gratitude, huh?”

“I knowed you wouldn’t throw down a friend, old top.  I was in the dumps.  A feller’ll talk most any way when he’s feeling the after effects, and is hungry and broke.  Now I’m my own man again.  What next?  Name it, bo—­I’m game.”

“Next,” said Johnny, “is bed, I guess.  You’re clean, now—­you can sleep here.”

Bland showed that he could feel the sentiment called compunction.

“Much obliged, bo—­but I don’t want to crowd you—­”

“You won’t crowd me,” said Johnny drily, “I aim to sleep with the plane.”  Bland may have read Johnny’s reason for sleeping with his airplane, but beyond one quick look he made no sign.  “Still nuts over it—­I’ll say you are,” he grunted.  “You wait till you’ve been in the game long as I have, bo.”

With a blanket and pillow bought on his way through the town, Johnny disposed himself for the night under the nose of the plane with the wheels of the landing gear at his back.  He was not by nature a suspicious young man, but he knew Bland Halliday; and to know Bland was to distrust him.

He felt that he was taking a necessary precaution, now that he knew Bland was in Tucson.  With the landing gear behind him, no one could move the airplane in the night without first moving him.

Now that he thought of it, Bland had been left fifty miles farther down the line, to catch his train.  Tucson was a perfectly illogical place for him to be in, even for the purpose of carousing.  One would certainly expect him to hurry to the city of his desires and take his pleasure there.  Johnny decided that Bland must still have an eye on the plane.

That he was secretly envious of Bland as an aviator did not add to his mental comfort.  Bland could speak with slighting familiarity of “the game,” and assume a boredom not altogether a pose.  Bland had drunk deep and satisfyingly of the cup which Johnny, to save his honor, must put away from him after a tantalising sip or two.  Not until Bland had said, “Wait till you’ve been in the game as long as I have,” had Johnny realized to the full just what it would mean to him to part with his airplane without being accepted by the government as an aviator.

At the Rolling R, when his conscience debt to Sudden pressed so heavily, he had figured very nicely and had found the answer to his problem without much trouble.  To enlist as an aviator with his airplane, or to sell the plane in Tucson, turn the proceeds over to Sudden to pay his debt and enlist as an aviator without the machine, had seemed perfectly simple.  Either way would be making good the mistakes of his past and paving the way for future achievements.  Parting with the plane had not promised to so wrench the very heart out of him when he fully expected to fly faster and farther in airplanes owned by the government; faster and farther toward the goal of all red-blooded young males:  glory or wealth, the hero’s wreath of laurel or the smile of dame Fortune.