Terry whipped up a book from the table--it was a volume answering many a question about how to act in society but without any mention of such a situation as now had arisen--and flung it straight into Blenham's hectic face. Then she slipped through the door behind her, slammed it, and ran out, down the porch and into the night. Behind her she heard Blenham's heavy, spurred boots and Blenham's curse. "If he comes on I will kill him!" She was at her car; her revolver was in her hand. She saw Blenham come outside. A moment he seemed to hesitate, his big bulk outlined against the door's rectangle of light. Then she heard him laugh and saw him return to the room. She came back slowly, tiptoe, to stand under the window. "You can drive the girl's car, can't you?" Blenham was asking. And when Temple admitted that he could: "Let's pile in an' be on our way. Like I said, you close with me tonight or I won't touch the thing." Then again Terry ran back to her car. She sprang in, started her engine, opened the throttle as she let in the clutch, and making a wide circle shot up the road, out the gate, and away into the darkness. "I'll take this pot yet, Mr. Cutthroat Blenham!" she was crying within herself. CHAPTER XVII AND CALLS ON STEVE Though a tempest brewed in her soul and her blood grew turbulent with it, Terry did not hesitate from the first second. Just the other day upon a certain historic log had she not said: "I hate Blenham worse than a Packard!" True, she had gone on to intimate that the youngest of the house of Packard was scarcely more to her liking than was the detested foreman. But-- Well, if Steve didn't know, at least Terry did, that that remark was uttered purely for its rhetorical effect. "He's been a pretty decent scout from the jump," Terry admitted serenely to herself as she threw her car into high and went streaking through the pale moonlight. Then she smiled, the first quick smile to come and go since she had hurled a book in Blenham's face. "A pretty decent scout from the jump!" He had literally jumped into her life, going after her quite as though---- "Oh, shucks!" laughed Terry. "It's the moonlight!" There came a certain sharp turn in the road where even she must slow down. Here Terry came to a dead stop, not so much in hesitation as because she was conscious of a departure from the old trails and felt deeply that the act might be filled with significance. For when she had made the turn she would have crossed the old dead line, she would have passed the boundary and invaded Packard property. "Well," thought Terry, "when you are between the devil and the deep sea what are you going to do?" So she let in her clutch, opened her throttle, sounded her horn purely by way of defiance, and when next she stopped it was at the very door of the old ranch-house where Steve Packard should be found at this early hour of the evening.