Man to Man.
by Jackson Gregory.
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 pa.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sionate 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 grat.i.tude 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 a.s.s, 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 grat.i.tude to a man who has just risked his life for you quite touching."
"Grat.i.tude? 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."