Man to Man
J >> Jackson Gregory >> Man to Man[Frontispiece: The blazing heat was such that men and horses and steers
suffered terribly.]
MAN TO MAN
BY
JACKSON GREGORY
AUTHOR OF
JUDITH OF BLUE LAKE RANCH, THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN, SIX FEET FOUR, ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
J. G. SHEPHERD
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS -------- NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published October, 1920
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. STEVE DIVES INTO DEEP WATERS
II. MISS BLUE CLOAK KNOWS WHEN SHE'S BEAT
III. NEWS OF A LEGACY
IV. TERRY BEFORE BREAKFAST
V. HOW STEVE PACKARD CAME HOME
VI. BANK NOTES AND A BLIND MAN
VII. THE OLD MOUNTAIN LION COMES DOWN FROM THE NORTH
VIII. IN RED CREEK TOWN
IX. "IT'S MY FIGHT AND HIS. LET HIM GO!"
X. A RIDE WITH TERRY
XI. THE TEMPTING OF YELLOW BARBEE
XII. IN A DARK ROOM
XIII. AT THE LUMBER CAMP
XIV. THE MAN-BREAKER AT HOME
XV. AT THE FALLEN LOG
XVI. TERRY DEFIES BLENHAM
XVII. AND CALLS ON STEVE
XVIII. "IF HE KNOWS--DOES SHE?"
XIX. TERRY CONFRONTS HELL-FIRE PACKARD
XX. A GATE AND A RECORD SMASHED
XXI. PACKARD WRATH AND TEMPLE RAGE
XXII. THE HAND OF BLENHAM
XXIII. STEVE RIDES BY THE TEMPLE PLACE
XXIV. DOWN FROM THE SKY!
XXV. THE STAMPEDE
XXVI. YELLOW BARBEE KEEPS A PROMISE
XXVII. IN HONOR OF THE FAIRY QUEEN!
ILLUSTRATIONS
The blazing heat was such that men and horses and steers suffered
terribly . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
The men about him and Packard withdrew this way and that leaving empty
floor space.
Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her eyes never brighter, popped
up on one side of the log.
"Say it!" laughed Terry. "Well, I'm here. Came on business."
MAN TO MAN
CHAPTER I
STEVE DIVES INTO DEEP WATERS
Steve Packard's pulses quickened and a bright eagerness came into his
eyes as he rode deeper into the pine-timbered mountains. To-day he was
on the last lap of a delectable journey. Three days ago he had ridden
out of the sun-baked town of San Juan; three months had passed since he
had sailed out of a South Sea port.
Far down there, foregathering with sailor men in a dirty water-front
boarding-house, he had grown suddenly and even tenderly reminiscent of
a cleaner land which he had roamed as a boy. He stared back across the
departed years as many a man has looked from just some such resort as
Black Jack's boarding-house, a little wistfully withal. Abruptly
throwing down his unplayed hand and forfeiting his ante in a card game,
he had gotten up and taken ship back across the Pacific. The house of
Packard might have spelled its name with the seven letters of the word
"impulse."
Late to-night or early to-morrow he would go down the trail into
Packard's Grab, the valley which had been his grandfather's and,
because of a burst of reckless generosity on the part of the old man,
Steve's father's also. But never Steve's, pondered the man on the
horse; word of his father's death had come to him five months ago and
with it word of Phil Packard's speculations and sweeping losses.
But never had money's coming and money's going been a serious concern
of Steve Packard; and now his anticipation was sufficiently keen. The
world was his; he had no need of a legal paper to state that the small
fragment of the world known as Ranch Number Ten belonged to him. He
could ride upon it again, perhaps find one like old Bill Royce, the
foreman, left. And then he could go on until he came to the other
Packard ranch where his grandfather had lived and still might be living.
After all of this--Well, there were many sunny beaches here and there
along the seven seas where he had still to lie and sun himself. Now it
was a pure joy to note how the boles of pine and cedar pointed straight
toward the clear, cloudless blue; how the little streams trickled
through their worn courses; how the quail scurried to their brushy
retreats; how the sunlight splashed warm and golden through the
branches; how valleys widened and narrowed and the thickly timbered
ravines made a delightful and tempting coolness upon the mountainsides.
It was an adventure with its own thrill to ride around a bend in the
narrow trail and be greeted by an old, well-remembered landmark: a
flat-topped boulder where he had lain when a boy, looking up at the sky
and thrilling to the whispered promises of life; or a pool where he had
fished or swum; or a tree he had climbed or from whose branches he had
shot a gray squirrel. A wagon-road which he might have taken he
abandoned for a trail which better suited his present fancy since it
led with closer intimacy into the woods.
It was late afternoon when he came to the gentle rise which gave first
glint of the little lake so like a blue jewel set in the dusty green of
the wooded slopes. As he rose in his stirrups to gaze down a vista
through the tree-trunks, he saw the bright, vivid blue of a cloak.
"Now, there's a woman," thought Packard without enthusiasm. "The woods
were quite well enough alone without her. As I suppose Eden was. But
along she comes just the same. And of course she must pick out the one
dangerous spot on the whole lake shore to display herself on."
For he knew how, just yonder where the blue cloak caught the sunlight,
there was a sheer bank and how the lapping water had cut into it,
gouging it out year after year so that the loose soil above was always
ready to crumble and spill into the lake. The wearer of the bright
garment stirred and stood up, her back still toward him.
"Young girl, most likely," he hazarded an opinion.
Though she was too far from him to be at all certain, he had sensed
something of youth's own in the very quality of her gesture.
Then suddenly he clapped his spurs to his horse's sides and went racing
down the slope toward the spot where an instant ago she had made such a
gay contrast to dull verdure and gray boulders. For he had glimpsed
the quick flash of an up-thrown arm, had heard a low cry, had guessed
rather than seen through the low underbrush her young body falling.
As he threw himself from his horse's back, his spur caught in the blue
cloak which had dropped from her shoulders; he kicked at it savagely.
He jerked off his boots, poised a moment looking down upon the
disturbed surface of the water which had closed over her head, made out
the sweep of an arm under the widening circles, and dived straight down.
And so deep down under water they met for the first time, Steve Packard
with a sense of annoyance that was almost outright irritation, the girl
struggling frantically as his right arm closed tight about her. A
quick suspicion came to him that she had not fallen but had thrown
herself downward in some passionate quarrel with life; that she wanted
to die and would give him scant thanks for the rescue.
This thought was followed by the other that in her access of terror she
was doing what the drowning person always does--losing her head,
threatening to bind his arms with her own and drag him down with her.
Struggling half blindly and all silently they rose a little toward the
surface. Packard tightened his grip about her body, managed to
imprison one of her arms against her side, beat at the water with his
free hand, and so, just as his lungs seemed ready to burst, he brought
his nostrils into the air.
He drew in a great breath and struck out mightily for the shore,
seeking a less precipitous bank at the head of a little cove. As he
did so, he noted how her struggles had suddenly given over, how she
floated quietly with him, her free arm even aiding in their progress.
A little later he crawled out of the clear, cold water to a pebbly
beach, drawing her after him.
And now he understood that his destiny and his own headlong nature had
again made a consummate fool of him. The same knowledge was offered
him freely in a pair of gray eyes which fairly blazed at him. No
gratitude there of a maiden heroically succored in the hour of her
supreme distress; just the leaping anger of a girl with a temper like
hot fire who had been rudely handled by a stranger.
Her scanty little bathing-suit, bright blue like the discarded cloak,
the red rubber cap binding the bronze hair--she must have donned the
ridiculous thing with incredible swiftness while he batted an
eye--might have been utterly becoming in other eyes than those of Steve
Packard. Now that they merely told him that he was a blundering ass,
he was conscious solely of a desire to pick her up and shake her.
"Gee!" she panted at him with an angry scornfulness which made him
wince. "You're about the freshest proposition I ever came across!"
Later, perhaps, he would admit that she was undeniably and most
amazingly pretty; that the curves of her little white body were
delightfully perfect; that she had made an armful that at another time
would have put sheer delirium into a man's blood.
Just now he knew only that in his moment of nothing less than stupidity
he had angered her and that his own anger though more unreasonable was
scarcely less heated; that he had made and still made but a sorry
spectacle; that he was sopping wet and cold and would be shivering in a
moment like a freezing dog.
"Why did you want to yell like a Comanche Indian when you went in?" he
demanded rudely, offering the only defense he could put mind or tongue
to. "A man would naturally suppose that you were falling."
"You didn't suppose any such thing!" she retorted sharply. "You saw me
dive; if you had the brains of a scared rabbit, you'd know that when a
girl had gone to the trouble to climb into a bathing-suit and then
jumped into the water she wanted a swim. And to be left alone," she
added scathingly.
Packard felt the afternoon breeze through the wet garments which stuck
so close to him, and shivered.
"If you think," he said, as sharply as she had spoken, "that I just
jumped into that infernal ice-pond, clothes and all, for the pure joy
of making your charming acquaintance in some ten feet of water, all I
can say is that you are by no means lacking a full appreciation of your
own attractiveness."
She opened her eyes widely at him, lying at his feet where he had
deposited her. She had not offered to rise. But now she sat up,
drawing her knees into the circle of her clasped arms, tilting her head
back as she stared up at him.
"You've got your nerve, Mr. Man," she informed him coolly. "Any time
that you think I'll stand for a fool man jumping in and spoiling my fun
for me and then scolding me on top of it, you've got another good-sized
think coming. And take it from me, you'll last a good deal longer in
this neck of the woods if you 'tend to your own business after this and
keep your paws off other folks' affairs. Get me that time?"
"I get you all right," grunted Packard. "And I find your gratitude to
a man who has just risked his life for you quite touching."
"Gratitude? Bah!" she told him, leaping suddenly to her feet. "Risked
your life for me, did you?" She laughed jeeringly at that. "Why, you
big lummox, I could have yanked you out as easy as turn a somersault if
you started to drown. And now suppose you hammer the trail while it's
open."
He bestowed upon her a glance whose purpose was to wither her. It
failed miserably, partly because she was patently not the sort to be
withered by a look from a mere man, and partly because a violent and
inopportune shiver shook him from head to foot.
Until now there had been only bright anger in the girl's eyes.
Suddenly the light there changed; what had begun as a sniff at him
altered without warning into a highly amused giggle.
"Golly, Mr. Man," she taunted him. "You're sure some swell picture as
you stand there, hand on hip and popping your eyes out at me! Like a
king in a story-book, only he'd just got a ducking and was trying to
stare the other fellow down. Which is one thing you can't do with me."
Her eyes had the adorable trick of seeming to crinkle to a mirth which
would have been an extremely pleasant phenomenon to witness had she
been laughing with him instead of at him. As matters stood, Packard
was quite prepared to dislike her heartily.
"I'd add to your kind information that the trail is open at both ends,"
he told her significantly. "I'm going to find a sunny spot and dry my
clothes. No objection, I suppose?"
He clambered up the bank and made his way to the spot whence he had
dived after her, bent on retrieving his boots and spurs. Her eyes
followed him interestedly. He ignored her and set about extricating a
spur rowel from the fabric of the bright blue cloak. Her voice floated
up to him then, demanding:
"What in the world are you up to now? Not going to swipe my clothes,
are you?"
"I'd have the right," he called back over his shoulder, "if I happened
to need a makeshift dressing-gown. As it is, however, I am trying to
get my spur out of the thing."
"You great big brute!" she wailed at him, and here she came running
along the bank. "You just dare to tear my cloak and I'll hound you out
of the country for it! I drove forty miles to get it and this is the
first time I ever wore it. Stupid!" And she jerked both the garment
and the spur from him.
The lining was silken, of a deep, rich, golden hue. And already it was
torn, although but the tiniest bit in the world, by one of the sharp
spikes. Her temper, however, ever ready it seemed, flared out again;
the crinkling merriment went from her eyes, leaving no trace; the color
warmed in her cheeks as she cried:
"You're just like all of the rest of your breed, big and awkward,
crowding in where you don't belong, messing up the face of the earth,
spoiling things right and left. I wonder if the good Lord Himself
knows what he made men for, anyway!"
The offending spur, detached by her quick fingers, described a bright
arc in the late sunlight, flew far out, dipped in a little leaping
spurt of spray, and went down quietly in the lake.
"Go jump in and get that, if you are so keen on saving things," she
mocked him. "There's only, about fifteen feet of water to dig through."
"You little devil!" he said.
For the spur with its companion had cost him twenty dollars down on the
Mexican border ten days ago and he had set much store by it.
"Little devil, am I?" she retorted readily. "You'll know it if you
don't keep on your side of the road. Look at that tear! Just look at
it!"
She had stepped quite close to him, holding out the cloak, her eyes
lifted defiantly to his. He put out a sudden hand and laid it on her
wet shoulder. She opened her eyes widely again at the new look in his.
But even so her regard was utterly fearless.
"Young lady," he said sternly, "so help me God, I've got the biggest
notion in the world to take you across my knee and give you the
spanking of your life. If I did crowd in where I don't belong, as you
so sweetly put it, it was at least to do you a kindness. Another time
I'd know better; I'd sooner do a favor for a wildcat."
"Take your dirty paws off of me," she cried, wrenching away from him.
"And--spank me, would you?" The fire leaped higher in her eyes, the
red in her cheeks gave place to an angrier white. "If you ever so much
as dare touch me again----"
She broke off, panting. Packard laughed at her.
"You'd try to scratch me, I suppose," he jeered; "and then, after the
fashion of your own sweet sex when you don't have the strength to put a
thing across, you'd most likely cry!"
"I'd blow your ugly head off your shoulders with a shot-gun," she
concluded briefly.
And despite the extravagance of the words it was borne in upon
Packard's understanding that she meant just exactly what she said.
He was getting colder all the time and knew that in a moment his teeth
would chatter. So a second time he turned his back on her, gathered up
his horse's reins, and moved away, seeking a spot in the woods where he
could get dry and sun his clothes. And since Packard rage comes
swiftly and more often than not goes the same way, within five minutes
over a comforting cigarette he was grinning widely, seeing in a flash
all of the humor of the situation which had successfully concealed
itself from him until now.
"And I don't blame her so much, after all," he chuckled. "Taking a
nice, lonely dive, to have a fool of a man grab her all of a sudden
when she was enjoying herself half a dozen feet under water! It's
enough to stir up a good healthy temper. Which, by the Lord, she has!"
CHAPTER II
MISS BLUE CLOAK KNOWS WHEN SHE'S BEAT
Half an hour later, his clothing wrung out and sun-dried after a
fashion, Packard dressed, swung up into the saddle, and turned back
into the trail. And through the trees, where their rugged trunks made
an open vista, he saw not two hundred yards away the gay spot of color
made by the blue cloak. So she was still here, lingering down the road
that wound about the lake's shores, when already he had fancied her far
on her way. He wondered for the first time where that way led?
He drew rein among the pines, waiting in his turn for her to go on.
The blue cloak did not move. He leaned to one side to see better,
peering around a low-flung cedar bough. His trail here led to the
road; he must pass her unless she went on soon.
Beside the vivid hue of her cloak the sunlight streaming through the
forest showed him another bright, gay color, a streak of red which
through the underbrush he was at first at a loss to account for. He
would have said that she was seated in a low-bodied, red wagon, were it
not that if such had been the case he must have seen the horses.
"An automobile!" he guessed.
He rode on a score of steps and stopped again. Sure enough, there she
sat at the steering-wheel of a long, rakish touring-car, the slump of
her shoulders vaguely hinting at despair and perhaps a stalled engine.
His grin widened joyously. He touched his horse with his one spur,
assumed an expression of vast indifference, and rode on. She jerked up
her head, looked about at him swiftly, gave him her shoulder again.
He rode into the road and came on with tantalizing slowness, knowing
that she would want to turn again and guessing that she would conquer
the impulse. A few paces behind her he stopped again, rolling a fresh
cigarette and seeming, as he had been before the meeting, the most
leisurely man in the world.
He saw her lean forward, busied with ignition and starter; he fancied
that the little breeze brought to him the faintest of guarded
exclamations.
"The blamed old thing won't go," chuckled Packard with vast
satisfaction. "Some car, too. Boyd-Merril Twin Eight, latest model.
And dollars to doughnuts I know just what's wrong--and she doesn't!"
She ignored him with such a perfect unconsciousness of his presence in
the same world with her that he was moved to a keen admiration.
"I'll bet her face is as red as a beet, just the same," was his
cheerful thought. "And right here, Steve Packard, is where you don't
'crowd in' until you're called on."
She straightened up, sitting very erect, her two hands tense upon the
useless wheel. He noted the poise of her head and found in it
something almost queenly. For a moment they were both very still, he
watching and feeling his sense pervaded by the glowing sensation that
all was right with the world, she holding her face averted and keeping
her thoughts to herself.
Presently she got out and lifted the hood, looking in upon the engine,
despairing. But did not glance toward him. Then she closed the hood
and returned to her seat, once more attempting to get some sort of
response from the starting system. Packard felt himself fairly beaming
all over.
"I may be a low-lived dog and a deep-dyed villain besides," he was
frank to admit to himself. "But right now I'm having the time of my
life. And I wouldn't bet two bits which way she's going to jump next,
either--never having met just her type before."
"Well?" she said abruptly.
She hadn't moved, hadn't so much as turned her head to look at him. If
she had done so just then perhaps Packard's extremely good-humored
smile, a contented, eminently satisfied smile, would not have warmed
her to him.
"Speak to me?" he asked innocently.
"I did. Simply because there's nobody else to speak to. Don't happen
to know anything about motor-cars, do you?"
It was all very icily enunciated, but had no noticeably freezing effect
upon the man's mood.
"I sure do," he told her cheerfully. "Know 'em from front bumper to
tail-lamp. Yours is a Boyd-Merril, Twin Eight, this year's model.
Fox-Whiting starting and lighting system. Great little car, too, if
you ask me."
"What I was going to ask you," came the cool little voice, more
haughtily than ever, "was not what you think of the car but if you--if
you happened to know how to make the miserable thing go."
"Sure," he replied to the back of her head, with all of his former
pleasant manner. "Pull out the ignition button; push down the starter
pedal with your right foot; throw out the clutch with your left; put
her into low; let in your clutch slowly; give her a little----"
"Smarty!" He had counted upon some such interruption, and chuckled
when it came. "I know all that."
"Then why don't you do it?" he queried innocently. "You're right
square in my way, the road's narrow, and I've got to be moving on."
"I don't do it," she informed that portion of the world which lay
immediately in front of her slightly elevated nose, "because it won't
work. I pulled out the ignition button and--and nothing happened.
Then I tried to force down the starter pedal and the crazy thing won't
go down."
"I see," said Packard interestedly. "Don't know a whole lot about
cars, do you?"
"The world wasn't made overnight," she said tartly. "I've had this
pesky thing a month. Do you know what's the matter?"
He took his time in replying. He was so long about it, in fact, that
Miss Blue Cloak stirred uneasily and finally shot him a questioning
look over her shoulder, just to make sure, he suspected, that he hadn't
slipped away and left her.
"Well?" she asked again.
"Speak to me?" he repeated himself, pretending to start from a deep
abstraction. "Oh, do I know what's the matter? Sure!"
She waited a reasonable length of time for him to go on. He, secure in
the sense of his own mastery of the situation, waited for her. Between
them they allowed it to grow very quiet there in the wood by the lake
shore. He saw her glance furtively at the lowering sun.
"If you do know," she said finally and somewhat faintly, but as
frigidly as ever, "will you tell me or won't you?"
"Why," he said, as though he had not thought of it, "I don't know. If
I were really sure that I was needed. You know it's mighty hard
telling these days when you stumble upon a damsel in distress whether a
stranger's aid is welcome or not. If there's one thing I won't do it's
shove myself forward when I'm not wanted."
"You're a nasty animal!" she cried hotly.
"For all I know," he resumed in an untroubled tone, "the end of your
journey may be just around the bend, about a hundred yards off. And if
I plunged in to be of assistance I might be suspected of being a fresh
guy."
"It's half a dozen miles to the ranch-house," she condescended to tell
him. "And it's going to get dark in no time. And if you want to know,
Mr. Smarty, that's as close as I've ever come or ever will come to
asking anything of any man that ever lived."
He could have sat there until dark just for the sheer joy of teasing
her, making her pay a little for her recent treatment of him. But
there was a note of finality in her voice which did not escape him; in
another moment she would jump down and go on on foot and he knew it.
So at last he rode up to the car, dismounted, and lifted the hood.
"Ignition," he ordered her.
She pulled out the little button again. His eyes upon hers, his grin
frank and unconcealed, he took a stone from the road and with it tapped
gently upon the shaft running from the pump. Immediately there came
that little hissing sound she had waited for.
"Starter," he commanded.
And now her foot upon the pedal achieved the desired results; the
engine responded, humming pleasantly. He closed the hood and stood
back eying her with a mingling of amusement and triumph. Her face
reddened slowly. And then, startling him with its unheralded
unexpectedness, a gay peal of laughter from her made quite another girl
of her, a dimpling, radiant, altogether adorable and desirable creature.
"Oh, I know when I'm beat!" she cried frankly. "You've put one across
on me to-day, Mr. Man. And since you meant well all along and were
just simply the blunderheaded man God made you, I guess I have been a
little cat. Good luck to you and a worth-while trail to ride."
She blew him a friendly kiss from her brown finger-tips, bent over her
wheel, and took the first turn in the road at a swiftly acquired speed
which left Steve Packard behind in dust and growing wonderment.
"And she's been driving only a month," was his softly whistled comment.
"Reckless little devil!"