d after Temple
and Terry.

As Steve followed a smile was in his eyes, a smile slowly parting his
lips.

"The scoundrel was right!" he mused. "And I hadn't even thought of it.
Now how the devil do you suppose he knew?"

And then, before he had gone a dozen yards a curious, puzzled,
uncertain look come into his face.

"If he knows," was his perplexity, "Does she?"

CHAPTER XIX

TERRY CONFRONTS HELL-FIRE PACKARD

"Father's got it in his head he is going to die!" cried Terry. "He
sha'n't. I won't let him!"

Steve Packard, riding into Red Creek, met Terry coming out. She was
just starting, her car gathering speed; seeing him she drew down
abruptly.

"I left him at the store," she added breathlessly. "He is sick. They
are friends there; they'll take care of him. He knows you are coming;
he has promised to do business with you and shut Blenham out of the
running. You are to hurry before Blenham gets there--he's across the
street at the saloon already. After his money, I guess; next thing,
unless you block his play, he'll be standing over poor old dad's bed,
bullyragging him. Come alive, Steve Packard, and beat him to it."

And with the last words she had started her car, after Terry's way of
starting anything, with a leap. Steve reined in after her, urging his
horse to a gallop for the first time, calling out sharply:

"But you--where are you going? Why----"

"After Doctor Bridges," Terry called back. "The fool is over at your
old thief of a grandfather's, playing chess! The telephone won't----"

He could merely speculate as to just what the telephone would not do.
Terry was gone, was already at the fork of the roads, turning
northward, hasting alone on a forty-mile drive over lonely roads and
into the very lair of the old mountain-lion himself. Steve whistled
softly.

"I wish she had invited me to go along," he grunted.

But, instead she had commissioned him otherwise. So, though his eyes
were regretful he rode on to the store. A backward glance showed him a
diminishing red tail-light disporting itself like some new species of
firefly gone quite mad; it was twisting this way and that as the road
invited; it fairly emulated the gyrations of a corkscrew what with the
added motion necessitated by the deep ruts and chuck-holes over and
into which the spinning tires were thudding.

Then the shoulder of a hill, a clump of brush, and Terry and her car
were gone from him, swallowed up in t