chuckling with Blenham when he gave the
message. Steve, in no mood to hear of his grandfather's high good
humor, tore the letter to bits, distributed them upon the afternoon
wind and told the lean cowboy that he could tell Grandfather Packard
and Blenham to go straight to everlasting blazes. The cowboy laughed
and rode away.

Steve, riding slowly through the lengthening shadows falling through
the pines of the mountain slopes before one comes to Drop Off Valley,
was overtaken by Terry Temple riding furiously. Terry's horse was
dripping with sweat; Terry's face was troubled; there was a look almost
of terror in her eyes.

"Steve Packard," she cried out as she came abreast of him and they
stared into each other's eyes in the dusk under the big trees. "Tell
me everything you know about those stolen steers! Everything."

So she knew, too? Yet he had cautioned Barbee not to talk and to
instruct the other boys to keep their mouths shut until such time as
they could understand this hand being played in the dark.

"Who told you?" he asked quickly.

"I saw them!" she told him, her spirit shining like fire in her eyes.
"The whole six of them. I knew they were not our cattle. I saw how
the brands had been worked, clumsily worked. Oh, my God, Steve
Packard, what does it mean?"

Now it flashed upon him. Terry was not speaking of the cattle lost
from the upland valley; she referred to those half-dozen big steers
roaming on the Temple ranch whose brands had been crudely altered from
the sign of the Big Bend outfit to the sign of her father's. Slowly
the red blood of shame, shame for her, crept up into his cheeks, dusky
under his tan.

"Terry," he began lamely.

But she halted him with the word, her ear catching the subtle note of
sympathy, her hand upflung, her temper flaring out that he, of all men,
should think shame of her blood.

"My father was never a thief!" she cried hotly, her voice ringing clear
and certain. "Not that, Steve Packard. Don't you dare say that! And
yet-- You saw them, you knew, and you didn't say a word to me, to
anybody?"

"I didn't know what to say or what to do,", he explained gently. "I
thought it best just to wait, to hope for the sense of all this
infernal jumble. I hoped----"

"You big fool!" she called him with all due emphasis. "Just like all
of the rest of your blundering sex. If the good Lord had stopped with
the job of making Adam, his whole creation wouldn't have