he rode deeper into the pine-timbered mountains. To-day he was
on the last lap of a delectable journey. Three days ago he had ridden
out of the sun-baked town of San Juan; three months had passed since he
had sailed out of a South Sea port.

Far down there, foregathering with sailor men in a dirty water-front
boarding-house, he had grown suddenly and even tenderly reminiscent of
a cleaner land which he had roamed as a boy. He stared back across the
departed years as many a man has looked from just some such resort as
Black Jack's boarding-house, a little wistfully withal. Abruptly
throwing down his unplayed hand and forfeiting his ante in a card game,
he had gotten up and taken ship back across the Pacific. The house of
Packard might have spelled its name with the seven letters of the word
"impulse."

Late to-night or early to-morrow he would go down the trail into
Packard's Grab, the valley which had been his grandfather's and,
because of a burst of reckless generosity on the part of the old man,
Steve's father's also. But never Steve's, pondered the man on the
horse; word of his father's death had come to him five months ago and
with it word of Phil Packard's speculations and sweeping losses.

But never had money's coming and money's going been a serious concern
of Steve Packard; and now his anticipation was sufficiently keen. The
world was his; he had no need of a legal paper to state that the small
fragment of the world known as Ranch Number Ten belonged to him. He
could ride upon it again, perhaps find one like old Bill Royce, the
foreman, left. And then he could go on until he came to the other
Packard ranch where his grandfather had lived and still might be living.

After all of this--Well, there were many sunny beaches here and there
along the seven seas where he had still to lie and sun himself. Now it
was a pure joy to note how the boles of pine and cedar pointed straight
toward the clear, cloudless blue; how the little streams trickled
through their worn courses; how the quail scurried to their brushy
retreats; how the sunlight splashed warm and golden through the
branches; how valleys widened and narrowed and the thickly timbered
ravines made a delightful and tempting coolness upon the mountainsides.

It was an adventure with its own thrill to ride around a bend in the
narrow trail and be greeted by an old, well-remembered landmark: a
flat-topped boulder where he had lain when a boy, looking u