But when the doctor came he looked so sort of sober that Mary V was afraid to ask him anything at all.  She went out into the hammock on the porch, where she could see the curtains flapping gently in the open window of Johnny’s room.  And after awhile the doctor came out and looked at her and smiled a little, and said, “Well, have we captured any more bandits?  By George, I’d hate to be one and run across you, young lady.  I had the honor of repairing the damage you did to ’em; and I will say, you are so-ome bone smasher!”

Which was all very well—­but what did Mary V care about the damage done to those Mexicans?  She looked at the open window with the flapping curtains, and then she looked at the doctor.  She did not ask a single question, and I don’t think she dreamed how wistful her eyes were.

“Well, our young aviator seems to be—­holding on,” the doctor observed very, very casually, seeming not to see the question Mary V’s eyes were asking because her lips would not form it in words.  “Better, on the whole, than I expected.”

“Then you think—­”

“I think we won’t worry about it until we have to.  They’re tough, these young devils.”

Mary V tried and tried to wring encouragement from the words, but it was very hard, with Johnny lying like that and never moving.

They brought the airplane to the ranch, much as Johnny had brought it up from “the burning sands of Mexico.”  Mary V went out to look at it, but it seemed too terrible to think of how high Johnny’s hopes had been, how he had worshiped that thing—­and what it had done to him.  She went to her ledge on the bluff, and sat there and cried heart-brokenly.

There it stood, reared up on its silly little wheels, with its broken propeller still pointing straight up at the sky.  Its tail was broken too—­and served it right for thrashing around like that in the brush.

She had not known her dad was having it brought in, until she saw them coming with it.  Little Curley had driven the team, and he had looked as though he was driving a hearse.  She did not even know what her dad was going to do with it.  He hadn’t said a word to anybody, about anything.  He just went ahead as if taking care of Johnny and Johnny’s airplane was part of the regular work on the ranch.  Even Bill did not appear to know, nor Bland.  Perhaps Sudden himself did not know.  It seemed to Mary V that the whole ranch was just waiting, minute by minute, for Johnny to open his eyes, or stop breathing.  The unbearable part of it was, no one said anything much about it.  They just waited.

The doctor came again, and he did not say anything at all to Mary V. He stayed at the ranch all night, mostly in the room with Johnny.  The next day another doctor came, and the nurse went in and out of the room sterilizing things and looking very mysterious and important—­but always with that intolerably reassuring smile.  Mary V gritted her teeth every time she saw that nurse.