Chapter 19

TERRY CONFRONTS HELL-FIRE PACKARD

"Father's got it in his head he is going to die!" cried Terry. "He sha'n't. I won't let him!"

Steve Packard, riding into Red Creek, met Terry coming out. She was just starting, her car gathering speed; seeing him she drew down abruptly.

"I left him at the store," she added breathlessly. "He is sick. They are friends there; they'll take care of him. He knows you are coming; he has promised to do business with you and shut Blenham out of the running. You are to hurry before Blenham gets there--he's across the street at the saloon already. After his money, I guess; next thing, unless you block his play, he'll be standing over poor old dad's bed, bullyragging him. Come alive, Steve Packard, and beat him to it."

And with the last words she had started her car, after Terry's way of starting anything, with a leap. Steve reined in after her, urging his horse to a gallop for the first time, calling out sharply:

"But you--where are you going? Why----"

"After Doctor Bridges," Terry called back. "The fool is over at your old thief of a grandfather's, playing chess! The telephone won't----"

He could merely speculate as to just what the telephone would not do. Terry was gone, was already at the fork of the roads, turning northward, hasting alone on a forty-mile drive over lonely roads and into the very lair of the old mountain-lion himself. Steve whistled softly.

"I wish she had invited me to go along," he grunted.

But, instead she had commissioned him otherwise. So, though his eyes were regretful he rode on to the store. A backward glance showed him a diminishing red tail-light disporting itself like some new species of firefly gone quite mad; it was twisting this way and that as the road invited; it fairly emulated the gyrations of a corkscrew what with the added motion necessitated by the deep ruts and chuck-holes over and into which the spinning tires were thudding.

Then the shoulder of a hill, a clump of brush, and Terry and her car were gone from him, swallowed up in the night and silence. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes after eight. She had forty miles ahead of her, a return of forty miles.

"It will take her two hours each way," he muttered, "unless she means to pile her car up in a ditch somewhere. Four hours for the trip. That means I won't see her until well after midnight."

And then he grinned a shade sheepishly; Blenham was right. He had thought of those four hours as though they had been four years.

But for her part Terry had no intention of being four hours driving a round trip of any eighty miles that she knew of; she had never done such a thing before and could see no cause for beginning to-night. True, the roads were none too good at best, downright bad often enough.

Well, that was just the sort of thing she was used to. And to-night there was need for haste. Great haste, thought the girl anxiously, as she remembered the look on her father's face when she and the storekeeper's wife had gotten him into bed.

"I'll have the roads all to myself; that's one good thing."

She settled herself in her seat, preparing for a tense hour. She, too, had marked the time; it had been on the verge of twenty minutes after eight as she left the store. "What right has the only doctor in the country to play chess, anyway? And with old Hell-Fire Packard at that? Two precious old rascals they are, I'll be bound. But a rascal of a doctor is better than no doctor at all, and-- Ah, a good, open bit of road!"

The car leaped to fresh speed under her. She glanced at her speedometer; the needle was wavering between twenty-seven and thirty miles. She narrowed her eyes upon the road; it invited; she shoved the throttle on her wheel a little further open; thirty miles, thirty-three, thirty-five--forty, forty-five--there she kept it for a moment--only a moment it seemed to her breathless impatience. For next came a series of curves where her road, rising, went over the first ridge of hills and where on either hand danger lurked.

Beyond the ridge the road straightened out suddenly. Better time now: twenty-five miles, thirty, thirty-five--and then, down in the valley, forty-five miles, fifty, fifty-five--her horn blaring, sending far and wide its defiant, warning echoes, her headlights flashing across trees, fences, patches of brush, and rolling hills--sixty miles.

"If my tires only stick it out--they ought to--this road hasn't a sharp rock on it."

But from sixty miles she must pull down sharply. Far ahead something was across the road; perhaps only a shadow, perhaps a tangible barrier; she didn't know these roads any too well.

She cut off her power, jammed on foot and emergency brakes, and so came to a stop just in time. Here a fence stretched across the road; the tall gate throwing its black shadows on the white moonlit soil was not five feet from her hood when she stopped.

She jumped down, threw the gate wide open, propped it back with a stone knowing full well how the farmers and cattlemen hereabouts builded their gates to shut automatically, drove through in such haste that she grazed the gate itself and so jarred it into closing behind her, and was again glancing from road to speedometer--twenty-five, thirty-five, a turn to negotiate, seen far ahead, dropping back to twenty-five, to twenty. A straight, alluring stretch--twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-two, sixty-three--the far rim of the valley, another line of hills black under the stars--fifty again and down to twenty-five, to twenty and horn blowing as she sped into the mouth of the first cañon.

And again, when at last she was down in Old Man Packard's valley and within hailing distance of his misshapen monster of a house, she set her horn to blaring like the martial trumpet of an invading army. Cattle and horses along her road awoke from their dozing in the moonlight, perhaps leaped to the conclusion that it was old Hell-Fire himself in their midst, flung their tails aloft and scampered to right and left, and Terry's car stood in front of Packard's door.

Right square in front of the door so that Terry herself could jump from her running-board and so that her front wheels were planted firmly in the old man's choice bed of roses. There were two flat tires, punctured on the way; two ruined, battered rims; her tank still held perhaps a gallon of gasoline. But she had arrived.

Before she leaped out Terry had glanced at her clock; she had made the trip of forty miles in exactly fifty-three minutes. Considering the state of the roads----

"Not bad," admitted Terry.

Then with a final clarion call of her horn she had presented herself at Packard's door. She had got a few of the wildest blown wisps of brown hair back where they belonged before the door opened. She heard hurrying feet and prepared herself by a visible stiffening for the coming of the arch villain himself. There was a sense of disappointment when she saw that it was only the dwarfed henchman come in the master's stead. Guy Little stared at her in pure surprise.

"Terry Temple, ain't it?" gasped the mechanician. "For the love of Pete!"

"I want Doctor Bridges," said Terry quickly. "He's here, isn't he?"

Guy Little instead of making a prompt and direct answer presented as puzzled a countenance as the girl ever saw. He was in slippers and shirtsleeves; he had a large volume which in his hands appeared little less than huge; his hair was as badly tousled as Terry's own; his eyes were frankly bewildered. Terry spoke again impatiently:

"Answer me and don't gawk at me! Is the doctor here?"

"For the love of Pete!" was quite all that Guy Little offered in response.

She sniffed and pushed by him, standing in the hallway and for the first time in her life fairly in the lion's den. She looked about her with lively interest.

"Say," said Little then. "Hold on a minute."

He came quietly close to her, his slipper-feet falling soundlessly.

"Doc Bridges is in there with the ol' man." He jerked his head toward the big library and living-room whose door stood closed in their faces. "They're playin' chess. Unless your sick man's dyin' I guess you better wait until they get through. Even if he is dyin'----"

"I'll do nothing of the kind!" retorted Terry emphatically. "When I've raced all the way from Red Creek, banging my car all up, risking my precious life every jump of the way, doing the trip in fifty-three minutes do you think that------"

"Hey?" cried Guy Little. "How's that? How many minutes? Fifty-three, you said, didn't you? Fifty-three minutes from Red Crick to here? Hey?"

"Is the man crazy?" demanded Terry. "Didn't I say I did? I could have done it in less, too, only with a flat tire and----"

"Hey?" repeated Guy Little, over and over. "You done that? Hey? You say----"

"I say," cut in Terry starting toward the closed door, "that there is a man sick and a doctor wanted."

"Oh, can that part of it!" cried Little, coming after her again in his excitement. "Chuck it! Forget it! The thing is that you made the run from there to here--an' in the night time--an' with tire trouble an'----"

"Doctor Bridges----"

"Is in there. Like I said. Playin' chess with the ol' man. You don't know what that means. I do. Mos' usually, askin' a lady's pardon for the way of sayin' it, it means Hell. Capital H. An' to-night the ol' man has got the door locked an' he's two games behind an' he's sore as a hoot-owl an' he says that anybody as breaks in on his play is-- No, I can't say it; not in the presence of a lady. There's times when the ol' man is so awful vi'lent he's purty near vile about it. Get me?"

"Guy Little, you just stand aside!" Terry's eyes blazed into his as she threw out a hand to thrust his back. "I came for the doctor and I'm going to get him."

Guy Little merely shook his head.

"You don't know the ol' man," he said quietly. "An' I do. I'm the only man, woman or child livin' as does know him. You stan' aside."

He stepped quickly by her and rapped at the door. When only silence greeted him he rapped again. Now suddenly, explosively, came Old Man Packard's voice, fairly quivering with rage as the old man shouted:

"If that's you, Guy Little, I'll beat your head off'n your fool body! Get out an' go away an' go fast!"

"It's important, your majesty," returned Guy Little's voice imperturbably.

He rubbed one slippered toe against his calf and winked at Terry, looking vastly innocent and boyish.

"I'm pullin' for you," he whispered. "There's jus' one way to do it." Aloud he repeated. "It's important, your majesty. An' there's a lady here."

"Lady?" shouted the old man, his voice fairly breaking with the emotion that went into it. "Lady? In my house? What do you mean?" Then, without waiting for an answer, "I don't care who she is or what she is or what the two of you want. Get out! This fool pill-roller in here thinks he can beat me playin' chess; you're in league with him to distract me, you traitor!"

Guy Little smiled broadly and winked again.

"Ain't he got the manner of a dook?" he whispered admiringly. And to his employer, "Say, Packard, it's the little Temple girl. Terry Temple, you know. An'----"

Even Terry started and drew back a quick step from the closed door. She did not know that a man's voice could pierce to one's soul like that.

"An'," went on Guy Little hurriedly, knowing that he must rush his words now if he got them out at all, "she's jus' drove all the way from Red Crick--in a Boyd-Merrill, Twin Eight car--had tire trouble on the road--an' done the trip in fifty-three minutes!"

He got it all out. A deep silence shut down after his words. A silence during which a man's eyes might have opened and stared, during which a man's mouth too might have opened and closed wordlessly, during which a man's brain might estimate what this meant, to drive forty miles in fifty-three minutes over such roads as lay between the Packard ranch and Red Creek.

"It's a lie!" shouted Packard. "She couldn't do it."

"I want Doctor Bridges----"

"Sh!" Guy Little cut her short. "I got the ol' boy on the run. Leave it to me." And aloud once more: "She done it. She can prove it. An'----"

There came a snort of fury from the locked room followed by the noise of a chess-board and set of men hurled across the room and by an old man's voice shouting fiercely:

"It's a cursed frame-up. Bridges, you're a scoundrel and I can beat you any three games out of five and I'll bet you ten thousan' dollars on it, any time! An' as for that thief of a Temple's squidge-faced girl-- Come in. Damn it all, come in and be done with it!"

And as he unlocked the door with a hand that shook and flung it wide open he and Terry Temple confronted each other for the first time.