readily; it was clear that she made no attempt to
conceal it: She was going to consummate a certain deal, she was grieved
and ashamed for her father, she remembered the "look on Blenham's face
to-night," and again and again her fury shot its red tide into her
cheeks.

"Blenham put his dirty hands on her," was Steve's thought; "or tried
to."

And he found that his own pulses drummed the hotter as he let his
imagination conjure up a picture for him, Blenham's big, knotted hands
upon the daintiness that was Terry. In that moment it seemed to him
that he had been drawn home across the seas to help mete out punishment
to a man: a man who had stricken old Bill Royce, and who now dared look
evilly upon Terry Temple.

Then came their second puncture, an ugly gash like the first caused by
a flinty fragment of rock driven against the worn outer casing.

"I ordered new tires a month ago," said Terry by way of explanation, as
she and Steve in the road together set about remedying the trouble.

While he was getting the inner-tube out, squatting in front of her car
so as to work in the glow from her headlights, she was rummaging
through her repair kit.

"These rocky roads, you know, and the way I drive."

He laughed. "The way she drove!" That meant, "Like the devil!" as he
would put it. Over rocky roads, racing right up to a turn, jamming on
her brakes when she must slow down a little; swinging about a sharp
bend so that her car slid and her tires dragged; in short getting all
of the speed out of her motor that she could possibly extract from it,
regardless and coolly contemptuous of skuffed tires and other trifles.

Finding the cut in the inner-tube was simple enough; the moonlight
alone would have shown it. He held it up for her to look at and she
shook her head and sighed. But making the patch so that it would hold
was another matter; and pumping up the tire when the job was done was
still another, and required time and ate up all of Terry's rather
inconsiderable amount of patience.

"A little more luck like this," she cried as once more they took to the
road, "and Blenham will put one over on us yet!"

It was borne in upon Steve that Terry's fears might prove to be only
too well founded. The time she had taken to drive to him at his ranch,
the time lost in returning to her home and in changing tires and
mending a puncture, had been put to better use by Blenham. True, he
was on horseback while they motored. A