But she couldn’t. Mary V knew she couldn’t. In the first place, her dad would ask her what she was doing on Black Ridge, which was far beyond her permitted range of activities. Her dad would foolishly maintain that she could glimpse all the desert necessary without going that far from the ranch. In the second place, he would probably tell her that he was paying Tex to ride the range and, if he met a Mexican, it was his business to send that same Mexican back where he came from. In the third place, he would think she was riding over there for a reason which was untrue and very, very unjust. And he wouldn’t fire Tex, because Tex was a good “hand” and hands were hard to find. He would simply make her promise to stay at home.
“He’d say it was perfectly all right for Tex—and perfectly all wrong for me. Dad’s tremendously pin-headed where I am concerned. So I suppose I’ll just have to say nothing, and ride all that long way in the hot sun to make sure that horrid Johnny Jewel is not being murdered or something. It doesn’t, of course, concern me personally at all—but dad is so short-handed this summer. And he actually threatened that he couldn’t afford me a new car this winter if wages go up or horses go down, or anything happens that doesn’t just please him. And I suppose Johnny Jewel has his uses, in the general scheme of dad’s business, so even if he is a mean, conceited little shrimp personally, I’ll have to go and make sure he isn’t killed, because it would be just like dad to call that bad luck, and grouch around and not get me the car.”
Mary V had barely reached this goal of personal unconcern for anything but her own private interests, when Tango began to manifest certain violent symptoms of having seen or heard something very disagreeable. Mary V had to take some long, boyish steps in order to snatch his reins before he bolted and left her afoot, which would have been a real calamity. But she caught him, scolded him shrewishly and slapped his cheek until he backed from her wall-eyed, and then she mounted him and went clattering down off the ridge without having seen any snake dens at all. Doubtless the boys had lied to her, as usual.
To Sinkhole Camp was a long way, much longer than it had looked from the top of Black Ridge. Mary V, her face red with heat, hurried on and on, wishing over and over that she had never started at all, but lacking the resolution to turn back. Yet she was considered a very resolute young woman by those who knew her most intimately.
Perversely she blamed Johnny Jewel for putting her to all this trouble and discomfort, and for interrupting her in her work of getting Desert Glimpses. She repeatedly told herself that he would not even have the common human instinct to feel grateful toward her for riding away down there to see if he were murdered.
She was right in that conjecture, at least. When she rode up to the squat adobe cabin, somewhere near noon, she found Johnny Jewel stretched morosely on his back, staring up at the low roof and thinking the gloomiest thoughts which a lonesome young man of twenty-one or two may conjure from a fit of the blues. That he was not murdered or even menaced with any danger seemed to Mary V a personal grievance against herself after that terrifically hot ride.
Johnny turned a gloomy glance upon her when she walked in and sat down limply on the one chair in the cabin; but he did not show any keen pleasure in her presence, nor any gratitude.
“Well! You’re still alive, then!” she said rather crossly.
“I guess I am. Why?” Johnny, his meditations disturbed by her coming, rose languidly and sat upon the side of his bunk, slouched forward with his arms resting across his strong young legs and his glance inclined to the floor.
“Oh, nothing.” Mary V took off her hat, but she was too fagged to fan herself with it. Her one emotion, at that moment, was an overwhelming regret that she had come. If Johnny Jewel had the nerve to think that she wanted to see him—
“You must love the sun,” Johnny observed apathetically. “Lizards, even, have got sense enough to stay in the shade such weather as this.” He rumpled his hair to let the faint breeze in to his scalp, and looked at her. “You’re red as a pickled beet at a picnic,” he told her ungraciously.
Mary V pulled together her lagging wits, marshaled her fighting forces, and flaunted a war banner in the shape of a smile that was demure.
“Well, one must expect to make some sacrifices when one is working in a good cause,” she replied amiably, and paused.
“Yeh?” Johnny’s eyes lost a little of their dullness. It is possible that he recognized that war banner of hers. “One didn’t expect to see one down here—on a good cause.”
“No? Well, you do see one, nevertheless. One is at work on an exhibit for one’s school, you see. Each of us girls was assigned a subject for vacation work. Mine is ‘Desert Glimpses’—a collection of pictures, curios and so on, representing points of interest in the desert country. I’ve a horned toad at home, and a blue-tailed lizard, and some pictures of jack rabbits, with their ears attached to the frame, and quite a few rattlesnake rattles. So to-day,” she smiled again at him, “I rode down here to take a picture of you!”
“Thanks,” said Johnny, apparently unmoved. “I didn’t know I was a point of interest in your eyes; but seeing I am, I’m willing the girls should have a picture of me framed. If you’ll go out and sit in the shade of the shack while I shave and doll up a little, you may take a picture. And I’ll autograph it for you. Five years from now,” he went on complacently, “you’re going to brag about having it in your possession. One of those I-knew-him-when kind of brags. And if you’ll bring the girls around some time when I’m pulling off an exhibition flight, I’ll let ‘em shake hands with me.”
“Well, of all the conceit!” By that one futile phrase Mary V owned herself defeated in the first charge. “Of all—”
“Conceit? Nothing like that! When you thought it was a good cause to ride all these miles on the hottest day of the year, just to get my picture—” Johnny smirked at her in a perfectly maddening way. He knew it was maddening to Mary V, for he had meant it to be so.
“I did not!” Mary V’s face could not be any redder than the heat had made it, but even so one could see the rise in her mental temperature.
“You said you did.”
“Well—I merely want your picture to put with my collection of donkeys! You—”
“You said points of interest,” Johnny reminded her. He had lost all his moroseness in the interest of the conversation. He had forgotten what a tonic his word-battles with Mary V could furnish. “You better stick to it, because it will sure pan out that way. You’ll hate to admit, five years from now, that you once took me for a donkey. Besides, you can’t have my ears to pin to the frame; I’ll need ‘em to listen to all the nice things some real girls will be saying to me when I’ve just made an exhibition flight.”
“Exhibition flight—of your imagination!” fleered Mary V, curling her lip at him. “And I won’t need your ears to prove you’re a donkey, so don’t worry about that.”
Johnny Jewel stood up, lifted his arms high above his head to stretch his healthy young muscles, pulled his face all askew in a yawn, rumpled his hair again and reached for his papers and tobacco. He knew that Mary V never noticed or cared if a fellow smoked; she was too thoroughly range-bred for that affectation.
“Good golly! Things must sure be dull at the ranch, if you had to ride twenty miles on a day like this to pick a fight with me,” he observed, leisurely singling one leaf out of his book of papers. “Left your horse to bake in the sun, too, I suppose, while you practice the art of persiflage on me.”
He finished rolling his cigarette, languidly helped himself to a match from a box on the wide window ledge near him, and sauntered to the door—with a slanting, downward glance at Mary V as he passed her. A little smile lurked at the corners of his lips now that his face was