"Butt in on your affairs!" he snorted after a fashion more than vaguely reminiscent of his grandfather. "I like that! As if I'd have come a step without your invitation." And so he blurted out the one thing he should have left unsaid, the thing which already rankled in Terry's proud heart. She had asked him to come; she had in a way suggested a--a sort of partnership. "Oh! how I hate you!" cried Terry. "You--you Packard!" "If there's some crime, some string of crimes that I have committed----" "Will you tear up those papers? I'll get you back your money. Will you tear up those papers?" "Will you explain what's gone wrong?" "I will not." He shrugged exasperatingly. "I'll keep the papers," he returned stonily. "I put over rather a good deal to-night, come to think of it." He put on his hat, jamming it down tight, and half turned to go. "When you want to talk ranch matters over with me--come to my ranch-house, little pardner!" "Oh!" cried Terry. "Oh!" CHAPTER XXII THE HAND OF BLENHAM "Each man's life is what he shapes it for himself." "A stupid, bare-faced, platitudinous lie!" Steve Packard, grown irritable here of late, flung the offending book through an open window and got to his feet. "A man's life is what the evil little gods of chance make it, curse them. Or what a fool of a girl tangles and twists it into." He shook himself viciously and went to his door, staring out across the hills vaguely moulded under the stars. Life was just a very unsatisfactory sort of a proposition. It was a game that wasn't worth the players' serious attention, a game all of chance and not in the least of skill, and not even interesting! So, in the sombre depths of his soul Steve Packard admitted freely. And, until a certain night only some six months ago, he had never divined this great truth. That night Blenham had sneered, "Stuck on her yourself, are you?" and Steve had recognized a vital fact inelegantly expressed; that night Terry Temple had appeared to him more than just a "good little sport"; that night he had somewhat brusquely considered the sweet femininity of her under her assumed surface of _diablerie_ and had found her infinitely desirable; that same night Terry, for no reason in the world that Steve Packard could discover, had suddenly congealed into a thing of ice that had never since thawed save only briefly before burning fits of wrath. Two hours after he had admitted to himself that he loved her she informed him with all of the emphasis she could summon for the occasion that she hated him. And life hadn't been what he had made it at all. The papers which Temple had signed were still in existence, safely deposited in a bank in San Juan. Steve had paid off the Temple mortgage to his grandfather; he had paid Temple a thousand dollars in cash; thereby he had acquired a half interest in the Temple ranch. That had all been quite in accordance with Terry's suggestions and entirely satisfactory.