hands on his hips, his eyes wide and glowing, his lips trembling and eager. He looked up at the top; with cottonwood poles and brush he could roof it against the sun and the winds. He looked at the fine, hard-packed sand floor that the winds never stirred. He looked at the walls.
But he would put his luck to another test. He would abide by it—so he told himself bravely. He felt in his pocket for a coin, pulled out a half dollar, balanced it on his bent thumb and forefinger. He turned white around the mouth, as he always did when deep emotion gripped him. He hesitated. What if—? But if his luck was any good, it would hold. It had to hold!
"Heads, I go. Tails, I stay." He muttered the fateful six words and snapped his thumb up straight. The half dollar went spinning, clinked against a high projection of rock, fell back to the sand floor.
Johnny stood where he was and stared at it. From where he was he could not see which side was uppermost, and he was afraid to go and look. But he had to look. He had to know, for he was still boy enough to feel solemnly bound by the toss. He walked slowly toward it, stared hard—and pounced like a kid after a hard-won marble.
"Heads, I go! That's the way I flipped 'er; it's a fair throw."
At the sound of his voice ringing in the confined space, Sandy lifted his head and looked at Johnny tolerantly. Johnny came toward him grinning, tossing the half-dollar and catching it, his steps springy. The last few yards he took in a run, and vaulted into the saddle without touching the stirrups at all. Even that did not seem to ease him quite. So he gave a whoop that echoed and re-echoed from the rock walls and made Sandy squat, lay back his ears, and shake his head violently.
At the mouth of the hidden nook Johnny turned to take a last, gloating survey of the place in the deepening dusk. "She sure will make one bird of a hangar!" he told Sandy glowingly. "Golly! Oh, good golly!"
Chapter Seven. Finder, Keeper
From the crest of a low, sandy ridge that had on it a giant cactus standing with four spiney, knobbed fingers uplifted like a warning hand, Johnny surveyed with wide, red-rimmed eyes the hidden basin that held his heart's desire. Tomaso's brother sat his sweaty horse beside Johnny and eyed both the gazer and the object of his gaze. A smile split whitely the swarthiness of Tomaso's brother's face.
"She's settin' there jus' like I told," he pointed out with a wilted kind of triumph, for the day was hot.
"Unh-hunh," Johnny conceded absent-mindedly. He was trying to make the thing look real to him after all the visions he had had of it.
He had had his spells of doubting the probity of Tomaso's brother; of secretly wondering whether the story of the plane might not be a ruse to lure him away from Sinkhole. But then, how would Tomaso or his brother know that Johnny would care anything about whether an airplane "sat" over in Mexico within riding distance of the Border? Johnny did not think of Tex as a possible factor in the proposition.
Well, there it was, anyway, not a quarter of a mile away. Between him and the object of his quest the sand lay wrinkled in tiny drifts, with here and there a ragged gray bush leaning forlornly from the wind. One wing of the machine was tilted, as though it had careened a little in the winds, but from that distance Johnny could not tell what damage had been done. He kicked Sandy in the ribs and led the way down the hill. Tomaso's brother, still grinning, followed close behind.
"It's going to be some sweet job getting the thing home," Johnny growled, trying to disguise his excitement. "I expect I've had my trip for nothing. She don't look to be in very good condition."
The grin of Tomaso's brother changed its expression a bit, but he did not trouble to answer. Tomaso's brother knew far better than did Johnny all the rules of commerce. Johnny's clumsy attempt to depreciate what he wanted very much to buy merely convinced Tomaso's brother of the extreme youthfulness of Johnny.
"Well, I might as well give her the once-over, now I'm here," Johnny added with a fine air of indifference, and urged Sandy into a trot.
Now Sandy had discovered the secret hangar for Johnny without having the slightest imagining of the use which Johnny hoped to make of it. That he should ever have to face a thing like this was beyond his most fevered imagination. He had been a tired, sweaty, head-hanging horse when he started down the slope. He had trotted along with his half-closed eyes on the ground before him, picking the smoothest path for his desert-weary feet. He did not look up until Johnny pulled sharply on the reins and gave a startling whoop built around the word "Whoa."
Sandy's bulging eyes got a full-front, close-up view of the "thing what set." He saw a wicked nose with a feeler about twice as high as he was. He saw great, terrible, outspread wings and a long slim body. It looked poised, ready to come at him and snatch him with one frightful swoop, as he had seen prairie hawks snatch little birds from the grass.
Sandy forgot that he was a tired, sweaty, head-hanging horse. He forgot everything except the four unbroken legs under him. He wheeled half away and went lunging up the far side of the little basin as if he felt the horrible creature close behind him.
Johnny's mind had been so absorbed by the airplane that it took him a few seconds to comprehend that Sandy was actually running away with him. It took him a few seconds longer to realize that Sandy's jaw was set like iron, with the bit gripped tight in his teeth. By the time he was thoroughly convinced that Sandy was going to be hard to stop, Sandy had topped the rise and was streaking it across an expanse of barrenness that rose gently in spite of the fact that it looked perfectly level. A sliding streak of gray dust rising into the heat waves marked his passing.
Nearly a mile he ran before the slight grade and a rocky strip slowed him down to a heavy gallop. Johnny had been in the mind to let the fool run himself down just for punishment, but the rocks and an eagerness to return to the stranded plane urged him to forego the discipline.
He stopped just where the scattered rocks ended abruptly in a wall that rimmed a sunken, green valley, narrowing near where Johnny stood looking down, but broadening farther along, and seeming to extend southward with many twistings and windings. Johnny viewed the place with a passing surprise, familiar though he was with the freakish topography of Arizona. It was the greenness, and the little winding creek, and the huddle of adobe buildings among the cottonwoods that struck him oddly. The creek might be a continuation of Sinkhole Creek, that disappeared into the sands away back there near his camp. There was nothing particularly strange about that, or the green growth that water made possible wherever the soil held latent fertility. It was the fact that those poor devils who lost the airplane—and themselves—should have wandered on and on, crazed with hunger and thirst when food and water and perhaps a guide were to be found within a mile or so of where they landed.
It was a pity, thought Johnny. But, being very human, he also thought that if the airmen had found this place, that plane would not be sitting back there waiting his grave if inexpert inspection. So with his pity cooled a little with self-interest, Johnny turned the puffing Sandy upon the backward trail and followed his tracks across the apparently level stretch of barrenness to the basin where waited the plane and Tomaso's brother. Only for Sandy's tracks, Johnny knew he might have had a little trouble in finding the place again, the country looked so unbroken and monotonous.
However, he found it too soon for Sandy's comfort. There it sat—the giant bird that had seemed ready to swoop and rise. But now its back was turned toward him, and it did not look quite so fearsome. He circled and plunged awhile, and even made shift to pitch a little, tired as he was. But man's mastery prevailed, just as it had always done, and Sandy found himself edging closer and closer to the thing. The horse of
