flying machine? It seemed that Johnny had made two ecstatic trips into the air—for a price—at the San Francisco Fair the fall before, and that his imagination had never quite felt solid ground under it since! Where—or how—could he learn?
If she were secretly trying to inveigle Johnny into showing her his new Correspondence Course, so that she might be a gleeful witness when he discovered her additions and revisions, she must have been a greatly disappointed young woman. For Johnny that day demonstrated how well he could keep a secret. He warmed to her apparent interest in his chosen profession, but he did not once hint at the lessons, and kept rigidly to generalities.
Mary V mentally called him sly and deceitful, and started another quarrel over nothing. While this particular battle was raging, there came an interruption which Mary V first considered sinister, then peculiar, and at last, after much cogitation, extremely suspicious and a further evidence of Johnny’s slyness.
A Mexican rode up to the doorway, coming from the east. Not Tomaso, who would have convinced even Mary V of his harmlessness, but a broad-shouldered, square-faced man with squinty eyes, a constant smile, and only a slight accent.
Johnny went to the door, plainly hesitating over the common little courtesy of inviting him in. The man dismounted, announced that he was Tomaso’s brother, and then caught sight of Mary V inside and staring out at him curiously.
His manner changed a little. Even Mary V could see that. He stopped where he was, squinting into the cabin, smiling still.
“I come to borrow one, two matches, señor, if you have to spare,” he said glibly. “Me, I’m riding past this way, and stop for my horse to drink. She’s awful hot to-day—yes?”
Johnny gave him the matches, made what replies were needful, and stood in the doorway watching the fellow ride to the creek and afterwards proceed to eliminate himself from the landscape. Mary V leaned sidewise so that she too could watch him from where she sat at the table. She was sure, when she saw him ride off, that he was the same man who had met Tex away back there in the arroyo.
She watched Johnny, wondering if he knew the man, or knew what was his real reason for coming. Whatever his real reason was, he had gone off without stating it, and Mary V believed that he had gone because she was there. She wished she knew why he had come, but she would not ask Johnny. She merely watched him covertly.
Johnny had turned thoughtful. He did not even see that Mary V was watching him, he was so busy wishing that she had not come at all, or that she had gone before this man rode up. Inwardly Johnny was all a-quiver with excitement. He believed that he knew why Tomaso’s brother had come.
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