uth too might have opened and closed wordlessly, during
which a man's brain might estimate what this meant, to drive forty
miles in fifty-three minutes over such roads as lay between the Packard
ranch and Red Creek.

"It's a lie!" shouted Packard. "She couldn't do it."

"I want Doctor Bridges----"

"Sh!" Guy Little cut her short. "I got the ol' boy on the run. Leave
it to me." And aloud once more: "She done it. She can prove it.
An'----"

There came a snort of fury from the locked room followed by the noise
of a chess-board and set of men hurled across the room and by an old
man's voice shouting fiercely:

"It's a cursed frame-up. Bridges, you're a scoundrel and I can beat
you any three games out of five and I'll bet you ten thousan' dollars
on it, any time! An' as for that thief of a Temple's squidge-faced
girl-- Come in. Damn it all, come in and be done with it!"

And as he unlocked the door with a hand that shook and flung it wide
open he and Terry Temple confronted each other for the first time.

CHAPTER XX

A GATE AND A RECORD SMASHED

The man never yet lived and knew old man Packard who would have
suggested that he was not a good and thorough-going hater. His enemy
and all of his enemy's household, wife and child, maid-servant and
man-servant were all as the spawn of Satan.

Now he stood back, his face flushed, his two hands on his hips, his
beard thrust forward belligerently and fairly seeming to bristle.
Terry Temple, her heart beating like mad all of a sudden and for no
reason which she would admit to herself, lifted her head and stepped
across the threshold defiantly. For a very tense moment the two of
them, old man and young girl, stared at each other.

Doctor Bridges still sat at the chess-table, his mouth dropping open,
his expression one of pure consternation; Guy Little stood in the
doorway just behind Terry, rubbing a slippered toe against his leg and
watching interestedly.

"So you're Temple's girl, are you?" snorted the old man. "Well, I
might have guessed it!"

And the manner of the statement, rather than the words themselves, was
very uncomplimentary to Miss Teresa Arriega Temple.

And, as a mere matter of fact--and old man Packard knew it well enough
down in his soul--he would have guessed nothing of the sort. So long
had he held her in withering contempt, just because of her relationship
to her father, so long had he invested her with all thinkably
distasteful