CHAPTER TWELVE

JOHNNY’S AMAZING RUN OF LUCK STILL HOLDS ITS PACE

On the shady side of the depot at Agua Dulce, Johnny sat himself down on a truck whose iron parts were still hot from the sun that had lately shone full upon it.  With lips puckered into a soundless whistle, and fingers that trembled a little with eagerness, he proceeded to unwrap one of the parcels he had just taken from the express office.  On another truck that had stood longer in the shade, a young tramp in greasy overalls and cap inhaled the last precious wisps of smoke from a cigarette burned down to an inch of stub, and watched Johnny with a glum kind of speculation.  Johnny sensed his presence and the speculative interest, and read the latter as the preparation for a “touch.”  And Johnny was not feeling particularly charitable after having to pay a seven-dollar C.O.D. besides the express charges.  He showed all the interest he felt in his packages and refused to encourage the hobo by so much as a glance.

He examined the slender ribs, bending them and slipping them through his fingers with the pleasurable feeling that he was inspecting and testing as an expert would have done.  He read the label on a tin of “dope,” unwrapped a coil of wire cable and felt it, went at a parcel of unbleached linen, found the end and held a corner up to the light and squinted at it with his head perked sidewise.

Whereupon the hobo gave a limber twist of his lank body that inclined him closer to Johnny.  “Say, if it’s any of my business, how much did Abe Smith tax yuh for that linen?” His tone was languid, tinged with a chronic resentment against circumstance.

Johnny turned a startled stare upon him, seemed on the point of telling him that it was not any of his business, and with the next breath yielded to his hunger for speech with a human being, however lowly, whose intelligence was able to grasp so exalted a subject as aircraft.

“Dunno yet—­I’ll have to look it up on the bill,” he said with a cheerful indifference that implied long familiarity with such matters.

“Looks to me like some of the same lot he stung me with last fall, is why I asked.  Abe will sting you every time the clock ticks.  Why don’t yuh send to the Pacific Supply Company?  They’re real people.  Got better stuff, and they’ll treat you right whether you send or go yourself.  Take it from me, bo, when you trade with Abe Smith you want a cop along.”

Johnny fingered the linen, his face gone sober.  “I told him to send the best he had in stock,” he said.

“Well, maybe he done it, at that,” the hobo conceded.  “His stock’s rotten, that’s all.”

“I was looking the bunch over so I could shoot it back to him if it wasn’t all right,” Johnny explained with dignity.  “They sure can’t work off any punk stuff on me, not if I know it.”

The hobo flipped his cigarette stub into the sand and stared out across the depressing huddle of adobe huts and raw, double-roofed shacks that comprised Agua Dulce.  His pale eyes blinked at the glare, his mouth drooped sourly at the corners.