ad been drawn from him, reached out for a bottle on the far
end of the mantel.

Then suddenly and without another word being spoken Terry was
galvanized into action. Blenham was coming on toward her and she saw
the look in his eye. She whipped back; her breath caught in her
throat; the color ran out of her cheeks. She glanced wildly toward her
father; his fingers were closing about the neck of a bottle when they
should have been at the neck of a man.

Terry whipped up a book from the table--it was a volume answering many
a question about how to act in society but without any mention of such
a situation as now had arisen--and flung it straight into Blenham's
hectic face. Then she slipped through the door behind her, slammed it,
and ran out, down the porch and into the night. Behind her she heard
Blenham's heavy, spurred boots and Blenham's curse.

"If he comes on I will kill him!"

She was at her car; her revolver was in her hand. She saw Blenham come
outside. A moment he seemed to hesitate, his big bulk outlined against
the door's rectangle of light. Then she heard him laugh and saw him
return to the room. She came back slowly, tiptoe, to stand under the
window.

"You can drive the girl's car, can't you?" Blenham was asking. And
when Temple admitted that he could: "Let's pile in an' be on our way.
Like I said, you close with me tonight or I won't touch the thing."

Then again Terry ran back to her car. She sprang in, started her
engine, opened the throttle as she let in the clutch, and making a wide
circle shot up the road, out the gate, and away into the darkness.

"I'll take this pot yet, Mr. Cutthroat Blenham!" she was crying within
herself.

CHAPTER XVII

AND CALLS ON STEVE

Though a tempest brewed in her soul and her blood grew turbulent with
it, Terry did not hesitate from the first second. Just the other day
upon a certain historic log had she not said:

"I hate Blenham worse than a Packard!"

True, she had gone on to intimate that the youngest of the house of
Packard was scarcely more to her liking than was the detested foreman.
But-- Well, if Steve didn't know, at least Terry did, that that remark
was uttered purely for its rhetorical effect.

"He's been a pretty decent scout from the jump," Terry admitted
serenely to herself as she threw her car into high and went streaking
through the pale moonlight. Then she smiled, the first quick smile to
come and go since she had hurle