"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, shifted 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 God 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 shift 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 Hell-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----"