"I'll get all three of you for this, s'elp me!"
They had bound his head up in a strip torn from an old sheet; the last they saw of him in the uncertain light was this bandage, rising and falling slowly as his horse bore him away.
Blenham gone, Barbee and Bill Royce went down to the bunk-house again, slipping in quietly. Steve Packard, alone in the ranch-house, sat smoking his pipe for half an hour. Then he went to bed, the bank-notes still in his shirt, his gun under his pillow.
Twice last night he had said to Joe Woods, the lumber-camp boss, "I'll see you in the morning."
Morning come, Steve breakfasted early, saddled his horse, and turned out across the fields to meet the rising sun. And it seemed to his fancies, set a-tingle in the early dawn freshness, that the rising sun, ancient symbol of youth and vigor and hope with triumph's wings, was coming to meet him.
At this period of the day, especially when he rides and is alone and the forests thicken all about him, man is prone to confidence. It had been a simple matter, so he looked upon it now, to have discovered the truth of the substituted bills last night; as simple a matter had been his winning at seven-and-a-half or his whipping big Joe Woods or his recovery of the lost legacy.
Blenham, or rather an agent of Blenham, had killed his horse; what then? His destiny had stepped forward; Terry had come; he had whizzed back to the ranch in her car and on time.
What if the ranch were mortgaged and to the hardest man in seven counties? What though his grandfather had obviously fallen supine before the old man's tempting sin, which is avarice, and was bound to break him? Was fate not playing him for her favorite?
To Steve Packard, riding to meet the sun and to keep his promise to the lumber boss, the world just now was an exceedingly bright and lovely place; in this hour of a leaping optimism he could even picture Terry Temple in a companionably laughing mood.
So early did he take to saddle that the fag end of the dawn was still sweet in the air when he passed under the great limbs of the stragglers of the forests clothing his eastern hill-slopes. He noted how between the widely separated boles the grass was thick and rich and untrampled; reserved against the time of need. There was no stock here yet.