“He’d say it was perfectly all right for Tex—­and perfectly all wrong for me.  Dad’s tremendously pin-headed where I am concerned.  So I suppose I’ll just have to say nothing, and ride all that long way in the hot sun to make sure that horrid Johnny Jewel is not being murdered or something.  It doesn’t, of course, concern me personally at all—­but dad is so short-handed this summer.  And he actually threatened that he couldn’t afford me a new car this winter if wages go up or horses go down, or anything happens that doesn’t just please him.  And I suppose Johnny Jewel has his uses, in the general scheme of dad’s business, so even if he is a mean, conceited little shrimp personally, I’ll have to go and make sure he isn’t killed, because it would be just like dad to call that bad luck, and grouch around and not get me the car.”

Mary V had barely reached this goal of personal unconcern for anything but her own private interests, when Tango began to manifest certain violent symptoms of having seen or heard something very disagreeable.  Mary V had to take some long, boyish steps in order to snatch his reins before he bolted and left her afoot, which would have been a real calamity.  But she caught him, scolded him shrewishly and slapped his cheek until he backed from her wall-eyed, and then she mounted him and went clattering down off the ridge without having seen any snake dens at all.  Doubtless the boys had lied to her, as usual.

To Sinkhole Camp was a long way, much longer than it had looked from the top of Black Ridge.  Mary V, her face red with heat, hurried on and on, wishing over and over that she had never started at all, but lacking the resolution to turn back.  Yet she was considered a very resolute young woman by those who knew her most intimately.

Perversely she blamed Johnny Jewel for putting her to all this trouble and discomfort, and for interrupting her in her work of getting Desert Glimpses.  She repeatedly told herself that he would not even have the common human instinct to feel grateful toward her for riding away down there to see if he were murdered.

She was right in that conjecture, at least.  When she rode up to the squat adobe cabin, somewhere near noon, she found Johnny Jewel stretched morosely on his back, staring up at the low roof and thinking the gloomiest thoughts which a lonesome young man of twenty-one or two may conjure from a fit of the blues.  That he was not murdered or even menaced with any danger seemed to Mary V a personal grievance against herself after that terrifically hot ride.

Johnny turned a gloomy glance upon her when she walked in and sat down limply on the one chair in the cabin; but he did not show any keen pleasure in her presence, nor any gratitude.

“Well!  You’re still alive, then!” she said rather crossly.

“I guess I am.  Why?” Johnny, his meditations disturbed by her coming, rose languidly and sat upon the side of his bunk, slouched forward with his arms resting across his strong young legs and his glance inclined to the floor.