t
back.

"Let me make sure again," he said hastily. "Let me be dead sure I've
made good."

He fumbled with the wallet, opened the flap, drew out the contents, a
neat pack of folded bank-notes. He counted slowly.

"Ten of 'em," he announced triumphantly as he gave the wallet over to
its proper owner.

Packard took them and they went back to the house. The rays of the
lamp met them; through the open door, back to the living-room, they
walked side by side. The table between them, they sat down. Packard
put the wallet down, spread out the ten bank-notes.

"Bill," he said, and there was a queer note in his voice, "Bill, you've
gone through hell for me. Don't I know it? And you say I'd do as much
for you? Are you sure of it, Bill?"

Royce laughed and rubbed his hands together.

"Dead sure, Stevie," he said.

Packard's eyes dropped to the table. Before him were the ten crisp
bank-notes. Each was for one dollar. Ten dollars in all. His
heritage, saved to him by Bill Royce.

"Bill, old man," he said slowly, "you've taught me how to play the
game. Pray God I can be as white with a pardner as you have been."

And, crumpling the notes with a sudden gesture, he thrust them into his
pocket.

CHAPTER VII

THE OLD MOUNTAIN LION COMES DOWN FROM THE NORTH

It was perhaps eight o'clock, the morning blue, cloudless, and still.
Packard had conferred briefly with Barbee; the Ranch Number Ten men had
gone about their work. Steve and Bill Royce, riding side by side, had
mounted one of the flat, treeless hills in the upper valley and were
now sitting silent while Royce fumbled with his pipe and Steve sent a
long, eager look down across the open meadow-lands dotted with grazing
cattle.

Suddenly their two horses and the other horses browsing in a lower
field, jerked up their heads, all ears pricked forward. And yet Steve
had heard no sound to mar the perfect serenity of the young day. He
turned his head a little, listening.

Then, from some remote distance there floated to him a sound strangely
incongruous here in the early stillness, a subdued screech or scream, a
wild, clamorous, shrieking noise which for the life of him he could not
catalogue.

It was faint because it came across so great a distance and yet it was
clear; it was not the throbbing cry of a mountain lion, not the scream
of a horse stricken with its death, nothing that he had ever heard, and
yet it suggested both of these sounds.

"B