So far he had not spent a hundred dollars of his salary on the upkeep of his machine.  He was glad of that, because he already had enough to pay old Sudden and have the price of a car left over.  With the Thunder Bird clear, and a couple of thousand dollars to the good—­why, he would not change places with the owner of the Rolling R himself!  He could go back any time and vindicate himself to the whole outfit.  He could pick Mary V up and carry her off now, without feeling that he was taking any risk with her future.  Poor little girl, she would be wondering what had become of him; he’d write, or send a wire, if Cliff would ever open his heart enough to take a fellow with him to where there was a post-office or something.

He was beginning to feel a deep need of some word from Mary V, was Johnny.  He was beginning to worry, to grow restive down here in the wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing save kill time between those short, surreptitious flights across to the notched ridge and back again.  Two weeks of that was beginning to pall.

But the money he was receiving did not pall.  It held him in leash, silenced the doubts that troubled him now and then, kept him temporizing with that uneasy thing we call conscience.

He climbed now into the cockpit, testing the controls absent-mindedly while he pondered certain small incidents that caused him a certain vague discomfort whenever he thought of them.  For one thing, why must a gatherer of news carry mysterious packages into Mexico and leave them there, sometimes throwing them overboard with a tiny parachute arrangement, as Cliff had done on the first trip, and flying back without stopping?  Why must a newspaper man bring back certain mysterious packages, and straightway disappear with them in the car?  That he should confer long and secretly with men of florid complexions and an accent which hardens its g’s and sharpens its s’s, might very plausibly be a part of his gathering of legitimate news of international import.  Though Johnny rather doubted its legitimacy, he had no doubt whatever of its world-wide importance.  Certain nations were at war—­and he was no fool, once he stopped dreaming long enough to think logically.

Those packages bothered him more than the florid gentlemen, however.  At first he suspected smuggling, or something like that.  But gun-running, that staple form of border lawbreaking, did not fit into any part of Cliff’s activities, though opium might.  But when he had made an excuse for handling one or two of the packages, they routed the opium theory.  They were flat and loosely solid, as packages of paper would be.  Not state documents such as melodramas use to keep the villains sweating—­they did not come in reams, so far as Johnny knew.  He could think of no other papers that would need smuggling into or out of a country as free as ours where freedom of the press has become a watchword; yet the idea persisted stubbornly that those were packages of paper which he had managed to take in his hands.