“It would be getting yourself killed!  And then what?  What good is civilization to you after you’re all smashed to pieces?  You—­you wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket, Johnny Jewel!  If it was our war—­but to go and butt in on something away over there is absolutely foolish.  What if you got one?  You couldn’t get them all, and there’d be a dozen to take its place.

“But that’s the way it goes.  You get a streak of perfectly unbelievable good luck, and have an aeroplane just practically drop into your hands, and then you spoil it all by wanting to do some crazy thing that is absolutely idiotic.  I should think you’d be contented with what you’ve got; but no, you must take your aeroplane right straight over to Europe and let the Germans smash it all to pieces and kill you and everything.  Why, I never heard of anything so absolutely imbecile as that!”

“Well, I haven’t gone yet,” Johnny reminded her.  “Maybe the thing won’t fly at all, and maybe I’ll break my neck learning to run it.  So it’s kinda early in the day to get excited about my going to France.”

“The idea!  I’m not a bit excited.  It really doesn’t concern me at all, personally, whether you go or not.  But it does look to me like a terribly silly idea.  Any person with fair reasoning faculties would argue against such idiocy, just as a matter of—­of—­”

“Of course.  Let it ride that way.  Would you think, just to look along this ledge, Mary V, that a real military tractor was cached away in it?  Talk about luck!  You wait till you see the place I’ve got for it.”

Mary V seemed unimpressed.  “If I might venture to advise you on a subject that has no personal interest for me,” she countered primly, “I would suggest that you hide most of that gas in one of these niches, and take only one can at a time to wherever your aeroplane is.  I tell you, Bland Halliday is not to be trusted.  You say he was broke and had lost his machine in a wreck or something, and was beating his way to the Coast.  The truth probably is that he lost it some other way—­maybe borrowed money on it and couldn’t pay it back.  That’s what he always does, and then gets drunk and spends it all.  But just as sure as you live, he’ll steal your machine if he gets a chance.  And once he’s in the air—­you can’t chase him up there, you know.  And you couldn’t prove it was your aeroplane afterwards, could you?  You haven’t any papers or anything; you said it was ‘finders, keepers.’  And he could claim that he found it himself, couldn’t he?”

She looked at Johnny’s sobering face, with the pursed lips and the crease between his eyes that told of worry.  Bland Halliday, once he was in the air, would be master of the situation.  Johnny saw that.

“But you see, Skyrider, he can’t fly without gas, and if you just have a little bit—­just enough to practice with—­”

“Mary V, when you aren’t on the fight you’re the best little pal in the world!” cried Johnny impulsively, and leaned and caught her hand and held it tight for a minute.