had belonged to his partners. His ghost'll haunt you if you're turning me down, kid. Why, ain't you the heir of a rich rancher over the hills? Ain't that what I been told?”
“I was,” said Terry, “until today.”
“Ah! You got turned out for beaning Minter?”
Terry remained silent.
“Without a cent?”
Suddenly the pudgy arm of Denver shot out and his finger pointed into Terry's face.
“You damn fool! This fifty is the last cent you got in the world!”
“Not at all,” said Terry calmly.
“You lie!” Denver struck his knuckles across his forehead. “And I was going to trim you. Black Jack, I didn't know you was as white as this. Fifty? Pal, take it back!”
He forced the money into Terry's pocket.
“And take some more. Here; lemme stake you. I been pulling a sob story, but I'm in the clover, Black Jack. Gimme your last cent, will you? Kid, here's a hundred, two hundred—say what you want.”
“Not a cent—nothing,” said Terry, but he was deeply moved.
Denver thoughtfully restored the money to his wallet.
“You're white,” he said gently. “And you're straight as they come. Keep it up if you can. I know damned well that you can't. I've seen 'em try before. But they always slip. Keep it up, Black Jack, but if you ever change your mind, lemme know. I'll be handy. Here's luck!”
And he was gone as he had entered, with a whish of the swiftly moved door in the air, and no click of the lock.
CHAPTER 19
The door had hardly closed on him when Terence wanted to run after him and call him back. There was a thrill still running in his blood since the time the yegg had leaned so close and said: “That wasn't Black Jack's way!”
He wanted to know more about Black Jack, and he wanted to hear the story from the lips of this man. A strange warmth had come over him. It had seemed for a moment that there was a third impalpable presence in the room—his father listening. And the thrill of it remained, a ghostly and yet a real thing.
But he checked his impulse. Let Denver go, and the thought of his father with him. For the influence of Black Jack, he felt, was quicksand pulling him down. The very fact that he was his father's son had made him shoot down one man. Again the shadow of Black Jack had fallen across his path today and tempted him to crime. How real the temptation had been, Terry did not know until he was alone. Half of ten thousand dollars would support him for many a month. One thing was certain. He must let his father remain simply a name.
Going to the window in his stocking feet, he listened again. There were more voices murmuring on the veranda of the hotel now, but within a few moments forms began to drift away down the street, and finally there was silence. Evidently the widow had not secured backing as strong as she could have desired. And Terry went to bed and to sleep.
He wakened with the first touch of dawn along the wall beside his bed and tumbled out to dress. It was early, even for a mountain town. The rattling at the kitchen stove commenced while he was on the way downstairs. And he had to waste time with a visit to El Sangre in the stable before his breakfast was ready.
Craterville was in the hollow behind him when the sun rose, and El Sangre was taking up the miles with the tireless rhythm of his pace. He had intended searching for work of some sort near Craterville, but now he realized that it could not be. He must go farther. He must go where his name was not known.
For two days he held on through the broken country, climbing more than he dropped. Twice he came above the ragged timber line, with its wind-shaped army of stunted trees, and over the tiny flowers of the summit lands. At the end of the second day he came out on the edge of a precipitous descent to a prosperous grazing country below. There would be his goal.
A big mountain sheep rounded a corner with a little flock behind him. Terry dropped the leader with a snapshot and watched the flock scamper down what was almost the sheer face of a cliff—a beautiful bit of acrobatics. They found foothold on ridges a couple of inches deep, hardly visible to the eye from above. Plunging down a straight drop without a sign of a ledge for fifty feet below them, they broke the force of the fall and slowed themselves constantly by striking their hoofs from side to side against the face of the cliff. And so they landed, with bunched feet, on the first broad terrace below and again bounced over the ledge and so out of sight.
He dined on wild mutton that evening. In the morning he hunted along the edge of the cliffs until he came to a difficult route down to the valley. An ordinary horse would never have made it, but El Sangre was in his glory. If he had not the agility of the mountain sheep, he was well-nigh as level-headed in the face of tremendous heights. He knew how to pitch ten feet down to a terrace and strike on his bunched hoofs so that the force of the fall would not break his legs or unseat his rider. Again he understood how to drive in the toes of his hoofs and go up safely through loose gravel where most horses, even mustangs, would have skidded to the bottom of the slope. And he was wise in trails. Twice he rejected the courses which Terry picked, and the rider very wisely let him have his way. The result was that they took a more winding, but a far safer course, and arrived before midmorning in the bottomlands.
The first ranch house he applied to accepted him. And there he took up his work.
It was the ordinary outfit—the sun-and wind-racked shack for a house, the stumbling outlying barns and sheds, and the maze of corral fences. They asked Terry no questions, accepted his first name without an addition, and let him go his way.
He was happy enough. He had not the leisure for thought or for remembering better times. If he had leisure here and there, he used it industriously in teaching El Sangre the “cow” business. The stallion learned swiftly. He began to take a joy in sitting down on a rope.
At the end of a week Terry won a bet when a team of draught horses hitched onto his line could not pull El
