They landed smoothly and stopped exactly where Johnny had planned to stop.  He climbed out, Cliff following more awkwardly, and the three of them wheeled the Thunder Bird under the oak where it was completely hidden.

It was not until he had come out again into the warm sunshine of mid-morning that Johnny observed how the kiddies were playing their part.  They had a curious little homemade wheelbarrow rigged, and were trundling it solemnly up and down and over and around the single mark made by the tail drag.  A boy of ten or twelve rode the barrow solidly and with dignity, while a thin-legged girl pushed the vehicle.  Behind them trotted two smaller ones, gravely bestriding stick horses.  Casually it resembled play.  It would have been play had not Mateo gone out where they were and inspected the result of stick-dragging and barrow-wheeling, and afterwards, with a wave of his hand and a few swift Mexican words, directed them to play farther out from the oak, where the Thunder Bird had first come to earth.  Solemn-eyed, they extended the route of their procession, and Johnny, watching them with a queer grin on his face, knew that when those children stopped “playing” there would be no mark of the Thunder Bird’s landing left upon that soil.

“I’ve sure got to hand it to the kids,” he told Cliff, who merely smiled and pulled out his cigarette case for a smoke.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

BUT JOHNNY WAS NEITHER FOOL NOR KNAVE

Cliff smiled faintly one morning and handed Johnny a long manila envelope over their breakfast table in Mateo’s cabin.  “Your third week’s salary,” he idly explained.  “Do you want it?”

“Well, I ain’t refusing it,” Johnny grinned back.  “I guess maybe I’ll stick for another week, anyway.”  He emptied his coffee cup and held it up for Mateo’s woman to refill, trying to match Cliff Lowell’s careless air of indifference to the presence of seventeen hundred dollars on that table.  “That is, if you think I’m making good,” he added boyishly, looking for praise.

“Your third week’s salary answers that, doesn’t it?  From now on it may not be quite so easy to make good.  Perhaps, since I want to go across this evening as late as you can make a safe landing over there, I ought to tell you that a border patrol saw us yesterday, coming back, and wondered a little at a government plane getting over the line.  He did not report it, so far as I know.  But he will make a report the next time he sees the same thing happen.”

“I wish I didn’t have that name painted clear across her belly,” Johnny fretted.  “But if I went and painted it out it would all be black, and that would be just as bad.  And if I took off the letters with something, I’m afraid I’d eat off the sizing too, or weaken the fabric or something.  I ought to recover the wings, but that takes time—­”