“Boy!  I sure do wish she was ready to take the air,” Johnny said under his breath to Sandy, who merely threw up his head and stared at the thing with sophisticated disapproval.

Johnny got down and went up to it, laid a hand on the propeller, where its varnish was still smooth.  Through a rift in the rock wall a bright yellow beam of sunlight slid kindly along the padded rim of the pilot’s pit; touched Johnny’s face, too, in passing.

Johnny sighed, stood back and looked long at the whole great sweep of the planes, pulled the smile out of his lips and went back to the cabin.  He wouldn’t have time to work on her to-day, he told himself very firmly.  He would have to ride the fences like a son-of-a-gun to make up for lost time.  And look over the horses, too, and ride past that boggy place in the willows.  It would keep him on the jump until sundown.  He wouldn’t even have a chance to go over his lessons and blue prints, to see just what he’d have to send for to repair the plane.  He didn’t even know the name of some of the parts, he confessed to himself.

He hated to leave the place unguarded while he made his long tour of the fence and the range within.  He did not trust the brother of Tomaso, who had been too easily jewed down in his price, Johnny thought.  He believed old Sudden was right in having nothing to do with Mexicans, in forbidding them free access to his domain.  Johnny thought it would be a good idea to do likewise.  Tomaso was to bring back the pliers, hammer, and whatever other tools they had taken, but after that they would have to keep off.  He would tell Tomaso so very plainly.  The prejudices of the Rolling R were well enough known to need no explanation, surely.

So Johnny ate a hurried breakfast, caught his fresh horse out of the pasture, and rode off to do in one day enough work to atone for the two he had filched from the Rolling R. He covered a good deal of ground, so far as that went.  He rode to the very spot where fifteen Rolling R horses had been driven through the fence and across the border, but since his thoughts were given to the fine art of repairing a somewhat battered airplane, he did not observe where the staples had been pulled from three posts, the wires laid flat and weighted down with rocks, so that the horses and several horsemen could pass, and the wires afterward fastened in place with new staples.  It is true that the signs were not glaring, yet he might have noticed that the wires there were nailed too high on the posts.  And if he had noticed that, he could not have failed to see where the old staples had been drawn and new ones substituted.  The significance of that would have pried Johnny’s mind loose from even so fascinating a subject as the amount of fabric and “dope” he would need to buy, and what would be their probable cost, “laid down” in Agua Dulce, which was the nearest railroad point.