"If that's you, Guy Little, I'll beat your head off'n your fool body! Get out an' go away an' go fast!" "It's important, your majesty," returned Guy Little's voice imperturbably. He rubbed one slippered toe against his calf and winked at Terry, looking vastly innocent and boyish. "I'm pullin' for you," he whispered. "There's jus' one way to do it." Aloud he repeated. "It's important, your majesty. An' there's a lady here." "Lady?" shouted the old man, his voice fairly breaking with the emotion that went into it. "Lady? In my house? What do you mean?" Then, without waiting for an answer, "I don't care who she is or what she is or what the two of you want. Get out! This fool pill-roller in here thinks he can beat me playin' chess; you're in league with him to distract me, you traitor!" Guy Little smiled broadly and winked again. "Ain't he got the manner of a dook?" he whispered admiringly. And to his employer, "Say, Packard, it's the little Temple girl. Terry Temple, you know. An'----" Even Terry started and drew back a quick step from the closed door. She did not know that a man's voice could pierce to one's soul like that. "An'," went on Guy Little hurriedly, knowing that he must rush his words now if he got them out at all, "she's jus' drove all the way from Red Crick--in a Boyd-Merrill, Twin Eight car--had tire trouble on the road--an' done the trip in fifty-three minutes!" He got it all out. A deep silence shut down after his words. A silence during which a man's eyes might have opened and stared, during which a man's mouth too might have opened and closed wordlessly, during which a man's brain might estimate what this meant, to drive forty miles in fifty-three minutes over such roads as lay between the Packard ranch and Red Creek. "It's a lie!" shouted Packard. "She couldn't do it." "I want Doctor Bridges----" "Sh!" Guy Little cut her short. "I got the ol' boy on the run. Leave it to me." And aloud once more: "She done it. She can prove it. An'----" There came a snort of fury from the locked room followed by the noise of a chess-board and set of men hurled across the room and by an old man's voice shouting fiercely: "It's a cursed frame-up. Bridges, you're a scoundrel and I can beat you any three games out of five and I'll bet you ten thousan' dollars on it, any time! An' as for that thief of a Temple's squidge-faced girl-- Come in. Damn it all, come in and be done with it!" And as he unlocked the door with a hand that shook and flung it wide open he and Terry Temple confronted each other for the first time. CHAPTER XX A GATE AND A RECORD SMASHED The man never yet lived and knew old man Packard who would have suggested that he was not a good and thorough-going hater. His enemy and all of his enemy's household, wife and child, maid-servant and man-servant were all as the spawn of Satan.