the boys were doing all
that was necessary and had asked him to go.

Then, after another two weeks, he had ridden again to the Temple ranch.
He found it deserted, doors and windows shut, dead leaves thick in the
path. His heart sank and thereafter knocked hard at his ribs; Terry
was gone and had said nothing to him. He turned and went home, bitter
and angry and hurt.

Where had she gone? He didn't know; he told himself he didn't care;
certainly he would bite his tongue out before he would ask any of her
friends. But he knew within himself that he did care as he had cared
about nothing else in the world; and he asked himself a thousand times:

"Where has Terry gone?"

For the world was not right without her; the sunlight was thin; the
season of bursting buds was but a pale, lack-lustre imitation of
spring. And as the long, hot days dragged by and the verdure died on
hill and plain and dusty mountainside, he asked himself "When will she
come back to us?"

Long after every one else had heard and forgotten the story, or at
least had given over all thinking upon it, Steve heard how Terry had
drawn against the last of the inconsiderable legacy left her long ago
by her Spanish mother, and had gone to San Juan.

She had friends there; the banker's wife, Mrs. Engle and her
fluffy-haired daughter, Florrie, had opened their arms to her and made
her tarry with them until the family made their annual trip East. Then
Terry had gone with them.

And never a word to Steve Packard. He cursed himself, tried to curse
her, and found that he couldn't quite make a go of it, and settled down
to good, hard work and the job of forgetting what a pair of gray eyes
looked like and how two certain red lips smiled and the tinkly notes of
a laughing voice.

In the good, hard work of stock ranching he succeeded more than well;
in the other task he set himself he failed utterly. Never, when alone
out on the range a shadow fell across, did he fail to look up quickly
with his lips half forming to the word, "Terry!" And, after all this
time, still no word from her, no word of her.

Eight thousand dollars he had paid to Temple. The remaining two
thousand of his father's heritage he had turned over promptly to his
grandfather to apply on his own indebtedness. He had consulted with
Bill Royce and Barbee and had cut down his crew of men, thereby
curtailing expenses.

He had sold a few head of beef cattle and banked the money for the
m