Tango lifted his head, pointed both ears forward and nickered a languid howdy to another horse.  Mary V turned quickly, a bit guiltily, and confronted Johnny himself, riding up with something dragging rigidly from the saddle to the ground behind Sandy’s heels.  The confusion in Johnny’s face served to restore somewhat the poise which Mary V had felt slipping.

“Hello, Skyrider,” she greeted him chirpily.  “Unless Venus has a filling station, you’ll need more gas than this, won’t you, for the round trip?  Or—­isn’t it to be a round trip?”

Johnny’s eyes flew wide open.  Then he laughed to cover his embarrassment.  “You’re not up on sky-riding, are you, Mary V?  I’ll have to train you a little.  I expect to ‘vollup, bank and la-and,’ coming back.”

“Poor Bud isn’t singing to-day.  A bronk slammed him against the fence and hurt his leg so he’s going around with a limp.  What is that contraption, for gracious sake?”

“That?  Why, that’s a travois.  You ask Sandy what it is, though, and he’ll give you a different name, I reckon.  Sandy’s beginning to think life is just one thing after another.  But he’s getting educated.”

Surreptitiously they eyed each other.

“Why do you buy your gas that way?” Mary V inquired with extreme casualness.  “It’s a lot cheaper if you get a drum, the way we do.”

“I know; but it’s a lot harder to handle a drum too.  Besides—­” Johnny broke his speech abruptly, hiding his confusion by straining to carry a case over to the travois.

Mary V studied his reply carefully, keeping silence until Johnny had loaded the other cases and was roping them to the travois frame.

“Is that Bland Halliday with you yet?” she asked him suddenly.

“Yeh—­er—­how do you know anything about Bl—­” Johnny was plainly swept off his guard.

“Why, why shouldn’t I know about BL?” Mary V’s smile was exasperating.  “I’ve seen Bland Halliday fly—­and fall, too, once.  Because he was drunk, they said.  I’ve seen him drunk, and trying to do figure eights with a car on Wilshire Boulevard.  He almost put me in the ditch, trying to dodge him.  He was arrested for that, and his car was taken away from him.  And I’ve heard—­oh, all kinds of scandal about him.  I was awfully surprised at your taking up with him.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Johnny Jewel.”

“He sure knows airplanes,” Johnny blurted unwisely.

“Yours must be ready to fly—­the amount of gas you’re taking to camp.”

“She goes in the air—­say, good golly, Mary V!  How do you know anything about my—­er—­”

“I hope,” said Mary V very mildly, “that I have some brains.  At any rate, I have brains enough to wonder how in the world you can afford to build yourself an aeroplane; I haven’t heard a word about any rich uncle dying and leaving you a fortune.  And I know it takes a tremendous lot of money to build and fly aeroplanes.”