A nice mess he had made of things, truly! Everything was a muddle, and like the fool he was, he went right on muddling things worse.

Even Mary V could see it, he told himself bitterly, and forgot that Mary V had said other things,--tender, pitying things,--before they had led him away from her.
He had no delusions regarding the seriousness of his plight.
Assaulting an officer was a madness he should have avoided above all else, and because he had yielded to that madness he expected to pay more dearly than he was paying old Sudden for his folly of the early summer.

It seemed to him that the rest of his life would be spent in paying for his own blunders.

It was like a nightmare that held him struggling futilely to attain some vital object; for how could he ever hope to achieve great things if he were forever atoning for past mistakes?
Now, instead of earning money wherewith to pay his debt to Sudden, he would be sweltering indefinitely in jail.

And when they did finally turn him loose, Mary V would be ashamed of her jailbird sweetheart, and his airplane would be--where?
He thought of Bland, having things his own way with the plane.
Dissipated, dishonest, with an instinct for petty graft--Johnny would be helpless, caged there under the roof of their jail while Bland made free with his property.