“Believe me, bo, if you’re stranded in this hole with a busted plane, yuh better not take on any contract of arguing with Abe Smith.  He’ll stall yuh off till you forget how to fly.”  He turned his pale stare to Johnny with a new interest.  “You aren’t making a transcontinental, are you?”

“Well—­n-no.  Not yet, anyway.  I—­live here.”  You may not believe it, but Johnny was beginning to feel apologetic—­and before a hobo, of all men.

“The deuce you do!” The tramp hitched himself up on another vertebra of his limp spine.  “Why, I thought you were probably just making a cross-country flight, and had a wreck.  I was going to bone yuh for a lift, in case you were alone.  You live here!  Why, for cat’s sake?”

“Gawd knows,” said Johnny.  Then added impulsively, “I don’t expect to go on living here always.  I’m going to beat it, soon as I get my airplane repaired, and—­” He was on the point of saying, “when I learn to fly it.”  But pride and his experience with the Rolling R boys checked him in time.

The hobo looked hungrily at the “makin’s” Johnny was pulling from the pocket of his shirt.  “At that you’re lucky,” he said.  “Having a plane to repair.  Mine’s junk, and I’m just outa the hospital myself.  I was a fool to ever go east, anyway.  They are sure a cold proposition, believe me.  Long as you’re lousy with money, and making pretty flights, you’re all right.  But let bad luck hit yuh once—­say, they don’t know you any more a-tall.  I was doing fine on the Coast, too, but a fellow’s never satisfied with what he’s got.  The game looked bigger back East, and I went.  Now look at me!  Bumming my way back when I planned to make a record flight!  Kicked off the train in this flyspeck on the desert; nothing to eat since yesterday, not even a smoke left on me, nor the price of one!” He accepted with a nod the tobacco and papers Johnny held out to him, and proceeded languidly to roll a cigarette.

“Down to straight bumming—­when I ought to be making my little old thousand dollars a flight.  Maybe you’ve kept in touch with things on the Coast.  I’m known there, well enough.  Bland Halliday’s my name.  Here’s my pilot’s license—­about all them sharks didn’t pry off me in the hospital!  I sure do wish I had of let well enough alone!  But no, I had to go get gay with myself and try and beat a sure thing.”

Johnny was gazing reverently upon the pilot’s license which he held in his hand, and he did not hear the last two or three sentences of the hobo’s lament.  He was busy breaking one of the ten commandments; the one which says, “Thou shalt not covet.”  That he had never heard of Bland Halliday did not disturb him, for in Arizona’s wide spaces one does not hear of all that goes on in the world.  He was sufficiently impressed by the license and what it implied, and he was thinking very fast.  Here was a man, down on his luck it is true, but a man who actually knew how to fly; a fellow who spoke of Smith Brothers Supply Factory with the contempt of familiarity; a fellow who had used some of the very same linen.