h; the Mex had passed it to Sprague.

Steve and Barbee and the man with Barbee--an old Ranch Number Ten hand
named Bandy Oliver--had stepped aside quietly. Terry stood with the
note in her hand, forgetting it for the moment. So, at the last,
matters had come to this: There lay a man over yonder, dead, with
Barbee's lead in him.

And old man Packard was coming to-night, now of all times when Steve's
heart was hard, when his brain was hot with his fury, when he had just
come upon men stealing his stock and had learned that his own
grandfather, the old mountain-lion from the north, was one of them.

"If they meet to-night," said Terry, "those two Packards, there are
going to be other men killed. Good men and bad men. And, as likely as
not, Blenham won't be one of them."

"There was another jasper with Sprague. He got away. That way, I
think. Couldn't say, but there might have been more; what with the
dark an' the cattle scared an' churnin' aroun'."

Steve with Barbee and Bandy Oliver had moved slowly away and toward the
upper end of the plateau. Detached words, fragments of their speech,
floated back to her more and more indistinctly on the night wind that
never sleeps upon these uplands.

Terry turned from them and stood for a little looking down into the
black void of the canon into which the stolen cattle had been lowered,
from which she and Steve had just climbed. She fancied that the
darkness down there was thinning. The dawn was coming up almost
imperceptibly over the mountain-tops, filtering wanly into the depths
of the canons. The night had rushed by; it would soon be day.

And old man Packard had not come. Thank God for that. Down in her
heart Terry was conscious of a leaping gladness. She knew, admitted
now, that she had been afraid. A man lay dead over yonder; if Packard
met Packard to-night there would be other men dead. Terry shivered and
drew back from the edge of the precipice.

"It's always colder just before day," she told herself.

"Sunrise already?"

Steve's voice, borne to her ears with startling distinctness. He had
not come nearer; maybe the dawn wind was stiffening, thus bearing his
words to her more clearly. Or it might be that Steve had lifted his
voice suddenly.

Why should a man be startled by a new sunrise? True, the night had
gone quickly, but----

"The sun never rose there!" Steve's voice again, thrilling through her
with its portent. "It's fire--range fire--