As a pleasing relief from useless cogitation on the subject, Johnny took his bank roll from a pocket he had sewed inside his shirt.  Like a miser he fingered the magic paper, counting and recounting, spending it over and over in anticipatory daydreams.  Thirty-two hundred dollars he counted in bills of large denomination—­impressively clean, crisp bills, some of them—­and mentally placed that amount to one side.  That would pay old Sudden, interest and all.  What was left he could do with as he pleased.  He counted it again.  There were three hundred dollars left from what Bland had earned—­Bland—­ What had become of Bland, anyway?  Little runt might be broke again; in fact, it was practically certain that he would be broke again, though he must have had close to a hundred dollars when they landed in Los Angeles.  Oh, well—­forget Bland!

So there were the three hundred—­gee golly, but it had cost, that short stay in the burg of Bland’s dreams.  A hundred dollars gone like the puff of a cigarette!  Well, there were the three hundred left—­he’d have been broke, pronto, if he had stayed there much longer.  Another hundred he had spent on the Thunder Bird—­golly, but propellers do cost a lot!  And that shotgun he never had had a chance to shoot—­Cliff sure was a queer guy, making him buy all that scenery, and then caching him away so no one ever got a chance to size him up and see whether he looked like a duck hunter or not.  Well, anyway, let’s see.  There were a thousand in big juicy hundreds; and five hundred more in fifties and twenties—­

Out beyond the oak’s leafy screen the dogs were barking and growling and the children were calling shrilly.  Johnny hastily put away his wealth and eased himself up so that he could peer out through the branches.  He had not consciously feared the coming of strangers, yet now he felt his heart thumping noisily because of the clamor out in the yard.  While he looked, two horsemen rode past and stopped at the cabin.

Now Johnny had been telling himself what a godsend some new face would be to him, yet he did not rush out to welcome the callers and ask the news of the outside world which Cliff was so chary of giving.  He did not by any sound or movement declare his presence.  He simply craned and listened.

One of the men he could not see because of a great, overhanging limb that barred his vision.  The other happened to stop just opposite a very good peephole through the leaves.  The kiddies were standing back shyly, patently interrupted in their pretended play of trundling the wheelbarrow and dragging the stick horses over the yard.  Rosa, the thin-legged girl, stood shyly back with her finger in her mouth, in plain sight of Johnny, though she could not see him in the deep shadow of the leaves.

It was the man that interested Johnny, however.  He was a soldier, probably one of the border patrol.  He sat his horse easily, erect in the saddle, straight-limbed and alert, with lean hard jaw and a gray eye that kept glancing here, there, everywhere while the other talked.  It was only a profile view that Johnny saw, but he did not need a look at the rest of his face with the other gray eye to be uncomfortably convinced that not much would escape him.