like a son-of-a-gun to make up for lost
time. And look over the horses, too, and ride past that boggy place in
the willows. It would keep him on the jump until sundown. He wouldn't
even have a chance to go over his lessons and blue prints, to see just
what he'd have to send for to repair the plane. He didn't even know the
name of some of the parts, he confessed to himself.

He hated to leave the place unguarded while he made his long tour of the
fence and the range within. He did not trust the brother of Tomaso, who
had been too easily jewed down in his price, Johnny thought. He believed
old Sudden was right in having nothing to do with Mexicans, in forbidding
them free access to his domain. Johnny thought it would be a good idea to
do likewise. Tomaso was to bring back the pliers, hammer, and whatever
other tools they had taken, but after that they would have to keep off.
He would tell Tomaso so very plainly. The prejudices of the Rolling R
were well enough known to need no explanation, surely.

So Johnny ate a hurried breakfast, caught his fresh horse out of the
pasture, and rode off to do in one day enough work to atone for the two
he had filched from the Rolling R. He covered a good deal of ground, so
far as that went. He rode to the very spot where fifteen Rolling R horses
had been driven through the fence and across the border, but since his
thoughts were given to the fine art of repairing a somewhat battered
airplane, he did not observe where the staples had been pulled from three
posts, the wires laid flat and weighted down with rocks, so that the
horses and several horsemen could pass, and the wires afterward fastened
in place with new staples. It is true that the signs were not glaring,
yet he might have noticed that the wires there were nailed too high on
the posts. And if he had noticed that, he could not have failed to see
where the old staples had been drawn and new ones substituted. The
significance of that would have pried Johnny's mind loose from even so
fascinating a subject as the amount of fabric and "dope" he would need to
buy, and what would be their probable cost, "laid down" in Agua Dulce,
which was the nearest railroad point.

As it was, he rode over tracks and traces and bits of sinister evidence
here and there, and because the fence did not lie flat on the ground, and
because many horses were scattered in the creek bottom and the draws and
dry arroyos, he returned to camp satisfied that all w