Man to Man Part 42

"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 s.e.x. If the good Lord had stopped with the job of making Adam, his whole creation wouldn't have been worth the snap of my thumb and finger."

"It isn't, anyway," said Steve. "I wouldn't swap your little finger for a king's gold crown----"

"Moons.h.i.+ne," cut in Terry. "Listen to me, Steve Packard: You saw those swapped brands and you kept your mouth shut."

"It is generally considered----"

"I said to listen to me! You didn't say a word to me because you believed my dad was a cattle-thief!"

Steve, despite himself, s.h.i.+fted uneasily in his saddle and finally dropped his eyes. Terry sat there staring at him fixedly, her own eyes wide open and again harboring that look that was almost fear.

"You--you--Oh, Steve Packard! This is contemptible of you!"

Then he lifted his eyes and looked at her solely enough.

"Terry Temple," he said very gently, "I pray G.o.d that you are right and that I am wrong. I did not know, I only saw what I saw, and wondered and kept my mouth shut. But--listen to me now, Terry Temple. You are not the one to dodge an issue, no matter how hard it is to face it.

Tell me: If your father did not s.h.i.+ft those brands, then who did? And why? Don't you see that is what it amounts to, that is what we've got to answer?"

"Blenham!" she told him swiftly, hardly waiting for him to finish.

"Blenham, under orders. Orders from your precious old thief of a grandfather!"

He smiled back at her, hoping to coax an answering smile to her lips and into her troubled eyes. But she only shook her head and went on steadily.

"Recrimination of a sort----"

"Recrimination is quite some word, no matter what it means," sniffed Terry. "But we can leave it out. In words of one syllable, your old thief of a grandfather ordered his pet dog and sub-thief to go tie something on poor old dad. And you fell for it! You ought to go to a school for the simple-minded."

"Just what," demanded Steve equably, "do you suppose a play like that would win for anybody? Any time my old thief of a grandfather, as you call him, hands an enemy of his several hundred dollars in beef cattle, why, just please wake me up."

"A play like that is just what old h.e.l.l-Fire would be up to right about now," she told him positively. "You have been proving something too much for him to swallow whole and boots on; your chipping in with us that time you took the mortgage over made him hungrier than ever to gobble up the crowd of us. So he plays the dirty trick of making it appear my father is a cattle-thief."

"Blenham might do a trick like that. My grandfather wouldn't. That is, I don't think he would."

"Better hedge! Wouldn't he, though! He's always been as mean as gar-broth; the older he gets the meaner and nastier he is. He'd do anything to double-cross a Temple and you know it. It's one crooked play; there'll be more like it. Just you see, Steve Packard. And the next one--at least if it concerns me--you see that you let me know about it instead of going around like a dumb man."

Then he blurted out word of the recent losses from Drop Off Valley.

For her herds mingled there with his and a part of the losses were to be borne by her.

"I'm on my way there now," he concluded. "I've an idea----"

"You haven't!" she interrupted. "Steve Packard, I don't believe you ever had an idea in your life. Don't you know--don't you know what's going with those steers up there?"

"Do you?"

"You just bet your life I do! It's that crook of a Yellow Barbee, in cahoots with that crook of a Blenham who's taking orders from that crook of an old h.e.l.l-Fire Packard! Can't you see their play?"

"I rather think I can. But I don't happen to be as positive about the unknown as you do."

"You're just a man," said Terry. "That's why. And now you are on your way to the feeding-grounds up there, to come in and say, 'Here I am, Barbee, come to watch you and see that you don't steal any more stock for me to-night.' That the idea?"

Steve laughed.

"Not exactly. I had intended leaving my horse before I got to the rim of the valley and going on on foot, not telling everybody what I was about."

"And you'd come to the rim of the valley either by h.e.l.l Gate pa.s.s or through the old Indian Trail, wouldn't you? And Barbee or Blenham would see that both ways were watched."

"You seem to know the trails rather well," he began, but she merely broke in:

"That's not all I know about this neck of the woods, either, Steve Packard. Maybe it's lucky for you and for me too that you told me all this. I'll take you into Drop Off Valley to-night, and Blenham and Yellow Barbee can watch all they please and never guess we're there.

For there's a way up that not even Blenham knows and where they will never look for us. Come on, Steve Packard; use a spur."

She shot by him, leading the way.

So Steve and Terry rode through the forests, pa.s.sing from the dull fringe of the day into the calm glory of the night, feeling the air grow cooler and sweeter against their faces, sensing the shutting-in about them of the gentle serenity of the wilderness. They followed little-travelled trails where she rode ahead and he, following close at her horse's heels, was glad each time that an open s.p.a.ce beyond or a ridge crested showed him her form p.r.i.c.ked clearly against the sky.

They spoke less and less as they went on. Deeper grew the silences into which they made their way, with only the gush of a mountain brook or the fluttering of a startled bird or the rustle of dead leaves under some alert little wild thing, just these sounds occasionally and ever the soft thud of shod hoofs on leaf mould and loose soil.

The stars multiplied swiftly, grew in brilliancy. But down here close to the face of the earth where the shadows were, the dark was impenetrable.

For many a mile Terry led the way through the forests. Steve was on the verge of suggesting that she had lost her way, when she turned off to the right and down a long slope in so decided a fas.h.i.+on that he closed his lips to his suspicion.

She knew where she was going; as he once again saw her body against a patch of sky--she had gone down the slope and climbed a ridge ahead--and as he noted her carriage and the poise of a chin for the instant clearly outlined, he knew that she was sure of herself. Well, she was that sort of a girl; she might have confidence in herself and a man might place his confidence with hers.

So at last Terry brought him down into a creek-bed and the bottom on a steep-sided canon. He merely said, "I'll take your word for it!" when she told him that this was the deep-cleft ravine which lay like a gash at the base of the sheer Drop Off Cliffs.

Yonder, perhaps a mile ahead and yet prominently a.s.serting itself to their view because of a certain widening and straightening of the canon here, a bold head of cliffs stood out like a monster carving in ebony.

Up there, at the top of these cliffs, was the southern end of Drop Off Valley.

"And it is up those cliffs that we are going," Terry announced when, having drawn nearer, they stopped again to gaze upward. "There's a trail climbing straight up from the bed of the pa.s.s; a trail to go hand-and-foot style. Once on top we'll be among Barbee's herds, Barbee guessing nothing of our coming since he'll be busy watching the other ways in. And-- Look!"

They were close together and she gripped his arm in her sudden amazement while she threw out one hand pointing. He heard her little gasp; he looked upward; an astonished e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n broke from his own lips. A breathless moment and already the thing, appearing from the black nothingness, silhouetted but a moment against the sky, was gone and he vaguely saw Terry's face turned toward him while they sought to find each other's eyes and know if each had seen what the other had glimpsed.

"It's impossible!" he muttered. "We are imagining things."

"Wait!" said Terry. "Maybe after all----"

They waited impatiently, their blood atingle. And in a very few moments there was, seeming absurd and impossible, a repet.i.tion of the vision which had so startled them: a black form at the head of the cliffs, the field of star-strewn sky back of it limning it into vivid distinctness--the ebon bulk of a steer moving straight out from the top of the precipice, straight out a half-dozen feet into nothingness of empty s.p.a.ce, then slowly descending through the air, gone silently in the deeper shadows of the canon below!

"Block and tackle!" muttered Steve abruptly. "A small steel cable.

Two or three men up there; a man on horseback down below. And while Barbee and the boys guard the other end----"

"Blenham puts one across on us down here!" Terry finished it for him.

"Only here's where we put one over on Blenham," rejoined Steve hotly.