Sudden stepped on the starter, the big car began to gurgle.  The search was on.  A hundred men were presently combing the desert land and looking for an airplane that had not flown that way—­just because Johnny Jewel was true to his supreme purpose in life.  And just because Johnny’s whole heart and soul were set upon repaying a conscience debt to Mary V’s father, Mary V herself was innocently saddling his conscience with a still greater debt.  For that is the way Fate loves to set us playing at cross-purposes with each other.

CHAPTER FIVE

GODS OR SOMETHING

“Well, here we are,” Johnny announced with more cheerfulness than the occasion warranted.  “Now what?”

Bland was staring slack-jawed after the squaws.  “Wasn’t them Injuns?” he wanted to know, and his voice showed some anxiety.  “We want to get outa here, bo, while the gittin’s good.  You bring any guns?” His pale eyes turned to Johnny’s face.  “I’ll bet they’ve gone after the rest of the bunch, and we don’t want to be here when they git back.  I’ll say we don’t!”

Johnny laughed at him while he climbed down.  “We made a dandy landing anyway,” he said.  “What ails that darned motor?  She didn’t do that yesterday.”

Bland grunted and straddled out over the edge of the cockpit, keeping an eye slanted toward the brush fringe.  What Johnny did not know about motors would at any other time have stirred him to acrimonious eloquence.  Just now, however, a deeper problem filled his mind.  Could he locate the fault and correct it before that brush-fringe belched forth painted warriors bent on massacre?  He pushed up his goggles and stepped forward to the motor.

“I put in new spark plugs just the other day,” Johnny volunteered helpfully.  “Maybe a connection worked loose—­or something.”  He got up on the side opposite Bland, meaning to help, but Bland would have none of his assistance.

“Say, f’r cat’s sake, keep a watch out for Injuns and leave me alone!  I can locate the trouble all right, if I don’t have to hang on to my skelp with both hands.  You got a gun?”

“Yeah.  Back in Tucson I have,” Johnny suppressed a grin.  Bland’s ignorance, his childlike helplessness away from a town tickled him.  “But that’s all right, Bland.  We’ll make ’em think we’re gods or something.  They might make you a chief, Bland—­if they don’t take a notion to offer you up as a burnt offering to some other god that’s got it in for yuh.”

Bland, testing the spark plugs hastily, one after the other, dropped the screwdriver.  “Aw, f’r cat’s sake, lay off that stuff,” he remonstrated nervously.  “Fat chance we got of godding over Injuns this close to a town!  They’re wise to white men.  Quit your kiddin’, bo, and keep a watch out.”  And he added glumly, “Spark plugs is O.K.  Maybe it’s the timer.  I’ll have to trace it up.  Quit turning your back on that brush!  You want us both to git killed?  Hand me out that small wrench.”