rather vicious pleasure in calling her bluff, but to his amazement she
did not call him back. He opened the door slowly. Still she did not
speak. He slammed it behind him and stepped into the hall.



CHAPTER 2


Twenty-four years made the face of Vance Cornish a little better-fed, a
little more blocky of cheek, but he remained astonishingly young. At
forty-nine the lumpish promise of his youth was quite gone. He was in a
trim and solid middle age. His hair was thinned above the forehead, but
it gave him more dignity. On the whole, he left an impression of a man
who has done things and who will do more before he is through.

He shifted his feet from the top of the porch railing and shrugged
himself deeper into his chair. It was marvelous how comfortable Vance
could make himself. He had one great power--the ability to sit still
through any given interval. Now he let his eye drift quietly over the
Cornish ranch. It lay entirely within one grasp of the vision, spilling
across the valley from Sleep Mountain, on the lower bosom of which the
house stood, to Mount Discovery on the north. Not that the glance of
Vance Cornish lurched across this bold distance. His gaze wandered as
slowly as a free buzzes across a clover field, not knowing on which
blossom to settle.

Below him, generously looped, Bear Creek tumbled out of the southeast,
and roved between noble borders of silver spruce into the shadows of the
Blue Mountains of the north, half a dozen miles across and ten long of