CHAPTER ONE

JOHNNY ASSUMES A DEBT OF HONOR

Since Life is no more than a series of achievements and failures, this
story is going to begin exactly where the teller of tales usually
stops. It is going to begin with Johnny Jewel an accepted lover and
with one of his dearest ambitions realized. It is going to begin there
because Johnny himself was just beginning to climb, and the top of his
desires was still a long way off, and the higher you go the harder is
the climbing. Even love does not rest at peace with the slipping on of
the engagement ring. I leave it to Life, the supreme judge, to bear me
out in the statement that Love must straightway gird himself for a life
struggle when he has passed the flowered gateway of a woman's tremulous
yes.

To Johnny Jewel the achievement of possessing himself of so coveted a
piece of mechanism as an airplane, and of flying it with rapidly
increasing skill, began to lose a little of its power to thrill. The
getting had filled his thoughts waking and sleeping, had brought him
some danger, many thrills, a good deal of reproach and much
self-condemnation. Now he had it--that episode was diminishing rapidly
in importance as it slid into the past, and Johnny was facing a problem
quite as great, was harboring ambitions quite as dazzling, as when he
rode a sweaty horse across the barren stretches of the Rolling R Ranch
and dreamed the while of soaring far above the barrenness.