A fine way to talk to the Flower of the Rancho!  Mary V looked as though she wanted to slap Johnny Jewel’s smooth, boyish face.

“Of course, you’re qualified to teach me,” she retorted.  “Such doggerel!  You ought to send it to the comic papers.  Really, Mr. Jewel, I have read a good deal of amateurish, childish attempts at poetry—­in the infant class at school.  But never in all my life—­”

“Oh, well, if you ever get out of the infant class, Miss Selmer, you may learn a few rudimentary rules of metrical composition.  I apologize for criticising your efforts.  It is not so bad—­for infant class work.”  He said that, standing there in the very coat which she had mended for him!

Mary V turned white; also she wished that she had thought of mentioning the “rudimentary rules of metrical composition” instead of infant classes.  She smiled as disagreeably as was possible to such humanly kissable lips as hers.

“No, is it?” she agreed sweetly.  “Witless wight was rather good, I thought.  Wight fits you so well.”

“Oh, that!” Johnny turned defensively to a tolerant condescension.  “That wasn’t so bad, if it hadn’t shown on the face of it that it was just dragged in to make a rhyme.  Do you know what wight means, Miss Selmer?”

Mary V was inwardly shaken.  She had always believed that wight was a synonym for dunce, but now that he put the question to her in that tone, she was not positive.  Her angry eyes faltered a little.

“I see you don’t—­of course.  Used as a noun—­you know what a noun is, don’t you?  It means the name of anything.  Wight means a person—­any creature.  Originally it meant a fairy, a supernatural being.  As an adjective it means brave, valiant, strong or powerful.  Or, it used to mean clever.”

“Oh, you!  I hate the sight of you, you great bully!” Mary V ducked past him and ran.

“I’ll help you look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know how,” Johnny called after her maliciously, not at all minding the epithet she had hurled at him.  He went on more cheerfully, telling himself unchivalrously that he had got Mary V’s goat, all right.  He began to whistle under his breath, until he discovered that he was whistling “Auld Lang Syne,” and was mentally fitting to the tune the words:  “Before I die, I’ll ride the sky.  I’ll part the clouds like foam!”

He stopped whistling then, but the words went on repeating themselves over and over in his mind.  “And by gosh, I will too,” he stated defiantly.  “I’ll show ’em, the darned mutts!  They can yawp and chortle and call me Skyrider as if it was a joke.  That’s as much as they know, the ignorant boobs.  Why, they couldn’t tell an aileron from an elevator if it was to save their lives!—­and still they think I’m crazy and don’t know anything.  Why, darn ’em, they’ll pay money some day to see me fly!  Boy, I’d like to circle over this ranch at about three or four thousand feet, and then do a loop or two and volplane right down at ’em!  Gosh, they’d be hunting holes to crawl into before I was through with ’em!  I will, too—­”