t last growing content.

She was half smiling at some shadowy thought before she had gone twenty
paces; she tossed off her hat and let it lie, meaning to come back for
it later; she unfastened the scarf about her neck, baring her white
throat to the hour's cool invitation, she let her bronze-brown hair
down in two loose, curling braids across her shoulders, toying with the
ends as she went.

Coming here at troubled moments altered the girl's mood very much as an
hour in a quiet cathedral may soothe the soul of the orthodox.

A little further on, lying across the stream and just around another
bend, was a great fallen cedar, its giant trunk eight or ten feet
through at the base. Approximately it marked the border-line between
the Temple Ranch and Ranch Number Ten; it was quite as though the
wilderness itself had cast down the big tree across an old trail to
indicate a line which must not be crossed.

Upon the top of this supine woodland monarch Terry was accustomed to
sit, her back against one of the big limbs, her heels kicking at the
mossy sides, while she glanced back and forth from Temple property to
Packard land and told herself how much finer was her side than the
other.

Just where the tree had fallen the creek-bed was rocky and uneven; the
water eddied and whirled and plunged noisily into its pools. Terry,
clambering up from her side of the big log, heard only the shouting of
the brook. She grasped the dead branches, pulled herself up, slipped a
little, got a new foothold; Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her
eyes never brighter, popped up on one side of the log just in time with
the tick of her destiny's clock.

[Illustration: Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her eyes never
brighter, popped up on one side of the log.]

That is to say just as Steve Packard, climbing up from the other side,
thrust his head up above the top. An astonished grunt from Steve who
in the first start of the encounter came close to falling backward; a
little choking ejaculation from Terry whose eyes widened
wonderfully--and the two of them settled silently into their places on
the cedar and stared at each other. Some three or four feet only lay
between the brim of Steve's hat and Terry's upturned nose.

"Well?" demanded Terry stiffly.

"Well?" countered Steve.

He regarded her very gravely. He had never had a girl materialize this
way out of space and his own thoughts. This sudden confronting savored
of the