take a brace we'd come alive yet."

"Remember we have a guest with us," grumbled Temple from his place by
the sitting-room fire.

"Oh, shoot!" exclaimed the girl impatiently. Reaching out for a second
sandwich she stabbed the kitchen-knife viciously into the roast. "I've
a notion to pack up and clear out and let the cut-throat crowd clean
you to the last copper and pick your bones into the bargain. When did
you ever get anywhere by taking your hat off and side-stepping for a
Packard? If you're so all-fired strong for remembering, why don't you
try to remember how it feels to stand on two feet like a man instead of
crawling on your belly like a worm!"

"My dear!" expostulated Temple.

Terry sniffed and paid no further attention to him.

"Dad was all man once," she said without lowering her voice, making
clearer than ever that Miss Terry Temple had a way of speaking straight
out what lay in her mind, caring not at all who heard. "I'm hoping
that some day he'll come back. A real man was dad, a man's man. But
that was before the Packards broke him and stepped on him and kicked
him out of the trail. And, believe me, the Packards, though they ought
to be hung to the first tree, are men just the same!"

"So I have heard," admitted the youngest of the defamed house. "You
group them altogether? They're all the same then?"

"Phil Packard's dead," she retorted. "So we'll let him go at that.
Old Hell-Fire Packard, his father, is the biggest lawbreaker out of
jail. He's the only one left, and from the looks of things he'll keep
on living and making trouble another hundred years."

"There was another Packard, wasn't there?" he insisted. "Phil
Packard's son, the old man's grandson?"

"Never knew him," said Terry. "A scamp and a scalawag and a tomfool,
though, if you want to know. If he wasn't, he'd have stuck on the job
instead of messing around in the dirty ports of the seven seas while
his old thief of a grandfather stole his heritage from him."

"How's that?" he asked sharply. "How do you mean 'stole' it from him?"

"The same way he gobbles up everything else he wants. Ranch Number Ten
ought to belong to the fool boy now, oughtn't it? And here's old
Packard's pet dog Blenham running the outfit in old Packard's interests
just the same as if it was his already. Set a thief to rob a thief,"
she concluded briefly.

Steve Packard sat bolt upright in his chair.

"I wouldn't mind getting the straight of t