They might be a travel-grimed lot, these gaudy-costumed traders in tinseled junk and these bandy-legged acrobats. But they had been somewhere, were going somewhere. They caught Hal's imagination, stirred it out of its long, dull dormancy. After he had halted some minutes, while his eyes caught the glint of sunlight on tent tops and fluttering little banners, he shot the juice to the old truck and, stiffening his backbone behind the wheel, rattled off down the street actually whistling. Out across town in an old field behind the warehouse, where he went to deliver the roll of cowhides, Hal's eye glimpsed something roped down to fence posts and a couple of stakes. A something that sent his heart blood pounding suffocatingly up to his very ears,--an airplane! A battered affair, with the look of having ridden the winds full many a time! But an airplane, for all that.