“Skyrider, Skyrider, where have you been? 
   I’ve been to see Venus, which made the moon grin. 
   Skyrider, Skyrider, what saw you there? 
   I saw old maid Venus a-dyeing her hair!”

Having through much industry accomplished all this while Johnny was putting up her horse, Mary V slid the revised lesson out of sight under other papers and was almost decently civil to Johnny when he returned.  She did not help him with dinner—­which was served cold for obvious reasons—­but she divided her sandwiches and sour pickles with him in return for a fried rabbit leg and a dish of stewed fruit.  In the intervals of their quarreling, which continued intermittently all the while she was there, Mary V quizzed him about his ambition to fly.  Did he really intend to learn “the game”?  Had he ever been up in a flying machine?  It seemed that Johnny had made two ecstatic trips into the air—­for a price—­at the San Francisco Fair the fall before, and that his imagination had never quite felt solid ground under it since!  Where—­or how—­could he learn?

If she were secretly trying to inveigle Johnny into showing her his new Correspondence Course, so that she might be a gleeful witness when he discovered her additions and revisions, she must have been a greatly disappointed young woman.  For Johnny that day demonstrated how well he could keep a secret.  He warmed to her apparent interest in his chosen profession, but he did not once hint at the lessons, and kept rigidly to generalities.

Mary V mentally called him sly and deceitful, and started another quarrel over nothing.  While this particular battle was raging, there came an interruption which Mary V first considered sinister, then peculiar, and at last, after much cogitation, extremely suspicious and a further evidence of Johnny’s slyness.

A Mexican rode up to the doorway, coming from the east.  Not Tomaso, who would have convinced even Mary V of his harmlessness, but a broad-shouldered, square-faced man with squinty eyes, a constant smile, and only a slight accent.

Johnny went to the door, plainly hesitating over the common little courtesy of inviting him in.  The man dismounted, announced that he was Tomaso’s brother, and then caught sight of Mary V inside and staring out at him curiously.

His manner changed a little.  Even Mary V could see that.  He stopped where he was, squinting into the cabin, smiling still.

“I come to borrow one, two matches, senor, if you have to spare,” he said glibly.  “Me, I’m riding past this way, and stop for my horse to drink.  She’s awful hot to-day—­yes?”

Johnny gave him the matches, made what replies were needful, and stood in the doorway watching the fellow ride to the creek and afterwards proceed to eliminate himself from the landscape.  Mary V leaned sidewise so that she too could watch him from where she sat at the table.  She was sure, when she saw him ride off, that he was the same man who had met Tex away back there in the arroyo.