She summoned a host of reasons, set them in ranks like so many soldiers to wage war for her, marshalled and deployed and reviewed and dress-paraded them, and found them all eminently satisfactory mercenaries.
There was one reason which she thrust into the background, seeking to keep it hidden behind the serried ranks of its brothers-in-arms. And yet it insisted in mutinous fashion on pushing to the fore. Seeking to consider the Packards en masse, as a curse rather than as individuals, she found that she was remembering Steve Packard rather vividly.
In the outward seeming Steve Packard was a gentleman; he had that vague something called culture; he bore himself with the assurance and ease of one who knew the world; he had been to college—and Terry knew nothing more of school than was to be learned at a country high school. Steve's father had "broken" her father financially; had such not been the fact Terry herself would have had her own college diploma on her wall; Terry would have known something more of the world than she now knew; she would have been "a lady."
"Oh, pickles!" cried Terry aloud, bringing her runaway thoughts to a sharp halt. "What difference does it make if he knows Latin and I don't? And a hot specimen of a 'lady' I'd make anyhow!"
Over a ridge she flew, the low sun glistening from her spurs and the polished surfaces of her boot-tops, down into the dusk-filled fragrance of a woodsy cañon, into the mouth of a silent trail, around a wide curve, and to her own favorite spot of all these woods. A nook of haunting charm with its sprawling stream, its big-boled and widely scattered trees, its grass and flowers. "Mossy Dell," she called it, having borrowed the name from an old romance read in breathless fashion in her room.
Slipping out of her saddle and leaving her horse to browse if such pastime suited him, Terry went through the trees and down along the flashing creek, humming softly, her voice confused with the gurgle of the noisy little stream, her eyes at last growing content.
She was half smiling at some shadowy thought before she had gone twenty paces; she tossed off her hat and let it lie, meaning to come back for it later; she unfastened the scarf about her neck, baring her white throat to the hour's cool invitation, she let her bronze-brown hair down in two loose, curling braids across her shoulders, toying with the ends as she went.
Coming here at troubled moments altered the girl's mood very much as an hour in a quiet cathedral may soothe the soul of the orthodox.
A little further on, lying across the stream and just around another bend, was a great fallen cedar, its giant trunk eight or ten feet through at the base. Approximately it marked the border-line between the Temple Ranch and Ranch Number Ten; it was quite as though the wilderness itself had cast down the big tree across an old trail to indicate a line which must not be crossed.
Upon the top of this supine woodland monarch Terry was accustomed to sit, her back against one of the big limbs, her heels kicking at the mossy sides, while she glanced back and forth from Temple property to Packard land and told herself how much finer was her side than the other.