“It circled and seemed to come down somewhere on this side the Potreros and it has not been seen since.  Ask the kids if they saw something that looked like a big bird flying.”  This from the unseen one, who had raised his voice as impatience seized him.  These Mexicans were so slow-witted!

Johnny heard Mateo’s voice, speaking at length.  He saw Rosa take her finger from her mouth, catch up a corner of her ragged, apron and twist it in an agony of confusion, and then as if suddenly comprehending what it was these senores wished to know, she pointed jerkily toward the north.  Perhaps the others also pointed to the north, for the lean-jawed soldier tilted his head backward and stared up that way, and Mateo spoke in very fair English.

“The kids, she’s see.  No, I dunno.  I’m busy I don’ make attenshions.  I’m fine out when—­”

“We know when,” the efficient looking soldier interrupted.  “You keep watch.  If you see it fly back, see just where it comes from and where it goes, and ride like hell down to camp and tell us.  You will get more money than you can make here in a year.  You sabe that?”

“Yo se, senor—­me, I’m onderstan’.”

“You know where our camp is?”

“Si, senor capitan.  Me, I’m go lak hell.”

“Well, there’s nothing more to be got here.  Let’s get along.”  And as they moved off Johnny caught a fragmentary phrase “from Riverside.”

The children had taken up their industrious play again, and their mother had turned from the open doorway to hush the crying of Mateo’s youngest in the cabin.  Mateo called the children to him and patted them on the head, and the senora, their mother, brought candy and gave it to them.  They ran off, sucking the sweets, gabbling gleefully to one another.  Cliff Lowell had been right, nothing is so disarming as a woman and children about a place where secrets are kept.

There had been no suspicion of Mateo’s cabin and the family that lived there in squalid content.  The incident was closed.

But Johnny slumped down in the seat again and glowered through the little, curved windshield at the crisply wavering leaves beyond the Thunder Bird’s nose.  He was not a fool, any more than he was a crook.  He was young and too confiding, too apt to take things for granted and let the other fellow do the worrying, so long as things were fairly pleasant for Johnny Jewel.  But right now his eyes were open in more senses than one, and they were very wide open at that.

There was something very radically wrong with this job.  The fiction of legitimate news gathering in Mexico could no longer give him any feeling save disgust for his own culpability.  News gathering did not require armed guards—­not in this country, at least—­and such mysteries as Cliff Lowell dealt in.  The money in his possession ceased to give him any little glow of pleasure.  Instead, his face grew all at once hot with shame and humiliation.  It was not honest money, although he had earned it honestly enough.  If it had been honest money, why should those soldiers go riding through the valleys, looking for him and his plane?  It was not for the pleasure of saying howdy, if Johnny might judge from the hard-eyed glances of that one who had stopped in plain view.