shot and at last, upon a narrow shelf of rock offering
sufficient foothold, she stopped.

Here, with her back tight pressed to a rock, her hands gripping at
irregularities on each side of her to steady her, she sent her questing
gaze down into Drop Off Valley.

Now she understood why there had as yet been no rifle-fire. The day,
coming on slowly, still offered more gloom than radiance, but she could
pick out two figures clearly. One was that of Steve. He had ridden on
ahead of his men, perhaps a hundred feet ahead, and was upon a bit of
higher ground.

The other form, bulking big in the thin light, was indisputably that of
old man Packard. Like Steve, he had ridden on in advance of his men.
She could just make out a dull mass yonder behind him which might have
been but a group of boulders had not the impatient stirring showed
where his horsemen were waiting.

It was very still there on the uplands in the dim dawning. In
breathless watchfulness a few men behind Steve watched; a few men
behind old man Packard watched; a girl upon a granite peak watched.
Down toward the lower end of the valley where the floor of the plateau
dropped precipitously into the steep-walled canon the fire Terry had
set was still burning fiercely. But the wind carried its fury away
from them, so that it was only an evil whisper.

Here and there, elsewhere in the valley, the fires still burned on.
There were wide stretches across which the flames had already swept so
that now they were ink-black, burnt-out, smoking a little. Upon such
an open space, still hot under their horses' hoofs, the two Packards,
grandfather and grandson, came face to face. And they were stern,
ominously set faces confronting each other.

At last they had pulled rein, both of them, looking grotesquely like
clockwork mechanisms, being actuated by the same impulse at the same
time. Some ten feet only were between their horses' tossing heads.
They were almost opposite Terry's lookout and at no great distance. In
the quiet pervading the valley their voices came to her. Not each
word, but a word now and then, lifted above its fellows, and always the
purport. For there was no mistaking the quality of the two voices.

Rage in old Packard was welcomed by wrath in young Packard. Heat and
anger and explosive denunciation, these were to be looked for now.
Never had it been the Packard way to temporize; always had it been the
Packard way to leap in and strike. Few