And now, suddenly confronted by the most amazingly pretty girl he had ever seen, he managed to snort that she was just what he knew she was—and in the snorting no one knew better than old man Packard that, as he could have put it himself, "He lied like a horse-thief!"
Terry had seen him once when she was a very little girl. He had been pointed out to her by one of her father's cowboys who, for reasons of his own, heartily hated and a little feared the old man. Since then the girl's lively imagination had created a most unseemly brute out of the enemy of her house, a beetle-browed, ugly-mouthed, facially-hideous being little short of a monstrosity.
And now Terry's fine feminine perception begrudgingly was forced to set about constructing a new picture. The old man, black-hearted villain that he was, was the most upstanding, heroic figure of a man that she had ever seen.
Beside him Doctor Bridges was a spectacle of physical degeneracy while Guy Little became a grotesque dwarf. The grandfather was much like the grandson, and—though she vowed to like him the less for it—was in his statuesque, leonine way quite the handsomest man she had ever looked on.
Perhaps it was at just the same instant that each realized that rather too great an interest had been permitted to go into a long, searching look. For Terry suddenly affected a look of supreme contempt while the old man jerked his eyes away, transferring his regard to the serene Guy Little.
"You said, Guy Little——"
"Yes, sir, I said it!" Guy Little nodded vigorously. "Them forty miles in fifty-three minutes. In the dark. An' with tire trouble. It's a record. The best you ever done it in was fifty-seven minutes. She beat you four minutes. Her!"
He indicated Terry.
"Doctor Bridges—" began Terry.
"It's a lie!" cried the old man, smashing the table top with a clenched fist. "I don't care who says it; she couldn't do it! No girl could; no Temple could. It ain't so!"