"Tell that smart young fool of a gran'son of mine," was the word Sprague gave Steve, "that right now I'm gettin' ready to polish him off final. Tell him what I done to him, blockin' his sale in San Juan, wasn't a patch on what I can do; tell him he'll lose more steers than he ever los' before. Tell him if he don't want to get hisself all mussed up in this deal he'd better come over to my place an' throw up his han's. I'm gettin' mad!"
Before having these words from Andy Sprague's twisted mouth Steve Packard had been puzzled to explain two matters: According to count, on one hand there were too few cattle by perhaps a score while on another hand there were too many by at least a half dozen. And, though Terry Temple was directly concerned, he had said nothing to her.
The first mystifying suggestion that some strange juggling of stock had been going on came to him just before he had driven the hundred and eighty-six steers to San Juan. Rounding up his own stock and cutting it out from Temple stock, he had had the opportunity to check up carefully in Terry's interests.
Calves, cows, steers, and horses, he knew to the head just what Terry numbered them. And in the round-up, going over his figures carefully, he had found that wearing the Temple brand there were six steers more than there should be. A matter of some five or six hundred dollars.
Were it only the financial end of it Steve would have thought little of the matter. But, going over the herd animal by animal, he made a discovery which shocked him. He found six big steers in the lot which wore fairly recently burned Temple brands--crudely scrawled over the brands of the Big Bend ranch, old man Packard's favorite outfit in the north.
It was impossible to know just how long ago a searing-hot iron had altered the range indication of ownership; Steve could merely stare and wonder and finally hazard a guess. Temple had been hard-driven; he had succumbed to temptation and opportunity as he had to whiskey and many other things. Seeing life obliquely he had no doubt told himself that he was squaring accounts. So, in the end, Steve was inclined to believe.
Just what to do he did not know. It seemed best to him to bide his time, to keep his eyes open, to hope for the way out of an embarrassing situation. He would willingly have made restitution himself, to save Terry from knowing and to save her name from the smudge which old man Packard would eagerly put upon it were he offered the opportunity. And right here was the trouble; he did not care to let his grandfather know what had happened.