Man to Man Part 26

A little later Guy Little returned, lighted the lamps, made a small fire in the big fireplace, and ignoring the presence of his master, went to stand in front of the high book-shelves. After a long time he got the step-ladder and placed it, climbed to the top, and squatted there in front of his favorite section. Ultimately he drew down a volume with many colored ill.u.s.trations; it was a tale of love, its _mise en scene_ the mansions of the lords and ladies whose adventures occurred in that atmosphere of romance which had captivated the soul of Guy Little.

When he climbed down and sought the big chair in which he would curl up to read and chew countless sticks of gum, chewing fast when the action hurried, slowly when there was the dramatic pause, stopping often with mouth wide open when tense and breathless interest held him, he discovered that the old man had gone out.

Guy Little pursed his lips. Then he went to the recently vacated leather chair. Not to sit in it; merely to draw out the little volume from under the cus.h.i.+on.

"'Lyrics from Tennyson,'" he read aloud. "What the devil are them things?"

He turned the pages.

"Pomes!" he grunted in disgust.

Whereupon he carried his own book to his own chair. But, beginning to turn the pages, he stopped and looked up wonderingly.

"Funny ol' duck," he mused. "Here I've knowed him all these years an'

I never guessed he read pomes!"

He shook his head, admitted to himself that the "ol' duck" was a keen ol' cuss, returned to his book, began stripping the paper from the first stick of gum, and knew no more of what went on about him.

CHAPTER XV

AT THE FALLEN LOG

Since the hill ranch operated by the Temples and the Packard Ranch Number Ten had over two miles of common border-line, it was unavoidable that Steve and Terry should meet frequently. Truly unavoidable since further they were both young, Terry as pretty as the proverbial picture, Steve the type to stick somehow in such a girl's mind. She turned up her nose at him; she gave him a fine view of her back; but in riding her father's range she let her eyes travel curiously across the line.

For his part Steve, seeing where some of his calves had invaded Temple property, followed the errant calves himself instead of sending one of his men. And as he rode he was apt to forget his strayed cattle as he watched through the trees for a fluttering, gay-hued scarf.

Certainly of girls and women he had known she was the most refres.h.i.+ng; certainly she was the prettiest after an undeniably saucy style. And life here of late, with Blenham and Woods gone and unheard from, was a quiet, uneventful affair.

Terry, for her part, told herself and any one else who cared to listen, that he was a Packard, hence to be distrusted, avoided, considered as beneath a white person's notice. His breed were all crooked. Sired and grandsired by precious scoundrels, he was but what was to be expected. And yet----

For "yets" and "ifs" and "howevers" had already begun to intrude, befogging many a consideration hitherto clear as cut gla.s.s. He had not lied about a horse being shot under him; he had been party to Blenham's departure from the ranch; he had been man enough in Red Creek to whip Joe Woods; and, single-handed, he had driven a crew of rough-and-ready timberjacks off his property.

Further, it was undeniable that he had a good-natured grin, that his eyes though inclined either to be stern or else to laugh at her, were frank and steady, that he made a figure that fitted well in the eye of a girl like Terry Temple.

"Oh, the Packards are men," said Terry begrudgingly, "even if they are pirates!"

This to her father and, it is to be suspected, for her father's sake.

For, despite the girl's valiantly repeated hope that Temple "would come back yet" and be again the man he once was, he seemed in fact to grow more s.h.i.+ftless day after day, communing long over his fireplace with his drink, pa.s.sing from one degree to another of untidiness. He made her "feel just like screaming and running around the house breaking things" at times.

"You are impatient, my dear," said Temple as one speaking to a very young child. "And there are matters which you don't understand; which I cannot even discuss with you. But," and he winked very slyly, less at Terry than just in a general acknowledgment of his own ac.u.men, "you just wait a spell! I've got somethin' up my sleeve--somethin' that---- Oh, you just wait, my dear!"

Terry sniffed.

"I ought to be pretty good at waiting by now," she told him, little impressed. "And if you have anything up your sleeve besides the flabby arm of a do-nothing, then it must be another bottle of whiskey! You can't flim-flam me, dad, and you ought to know it."

She whisked out of the house, her face reddened with vexation, a sudden moisture in her eyes. It took all of the fort.i.tude she could summon into her dauntless little bosom to maintain after days like this that there was still a "come-back" left in her father.

In an hour made fragrant by the resinous odors of the upland pines and the freshly liberated perfumes of the little white evening flowers thick in the meadows, Terry on her favorite horse went flas.h.i.+ng through the long shadows of the late afternoon, riding as Terry always rode when her breast was tumultuous and her temper rising.

The recently imported j.a.panese cook and houseboy peered out after her from his kitchen window, his eyes actually losing their Oriental cast and growing round; a trick, this, of Iki's whenever Terry came into his view.

"Part bird," mused Iki, "part flower, big part wild devil-girl! Oof!

Nice to look at, but for wife j.a.ponee girl more better. Think so."

Little by little as she rode, letting her horse out until she fairly raced through the fields and into the woods beyond, the pitiful picture of her father faded from her mind. As the vision dimmed of Temple's shoddiness in his worn-out slippers another image formed in Terry's mind; an image which was there more than the girl had as yet come to realize.

Yes, as types the Packards were all right; how many times had she admitted that to herself? But as individuals . . . Oh, how she hated them! And to-day, for some reason not clearly defined in Terry's consciousness, she found it convenient to a.s.sure herself with new emphasis that she hated and despised the Packards with a growing detestation, and from this point to go on and inform Miss Teresa Temple exactly why she looked on those of the Packard blood just as she did.

She summoned a host of reasons, set them in ranks like so many soldiers to wage war for her, marshalled and deployed and reviewed and dress-paraded them, and found them all eminently satisfactory mercenaries.

There was one reason which she thrust into the background, seeking to keep it hidden behind the serried ranks of its brothers-in-arms. And yet it insisted in mutinous fas.h.i.+on on pus.h.i.+ng to the fore. Seeking to consider the Packards en ma.s.se, as a curse rather than as individuals, she found that she was remembering Steve Packard rather vividly.

In the outward seeming Steve Packard was a gentleman; he had that vague something called culture; he bore himself with the a.s.surance and ease of one who knew the world; he had been to college--and Terry knew nothing more of school than was to be learned at a country high school.

Steve's father had "broken" her father financially; had such not been the fact Terry herself would have had her own college diploma on her wall; Terry would have known something more of the world than she now knew; she would have been "a lady."

"Oh, pickles!" cried Terry aloud, bringing her runaway thoughts to a sharp halt. "What difference does it make if he knows Latin and I don't? And a hot specimen of a 'lady' I'd make anyhow!"

Over a ridge she flew, the low sun glistening from her spurs and the polished surfaces of her boot-tops, down into the dusk-filled fragrance of a woodsy canon, into the mouth of a silent trail, around a wide curve, and to her own favorite spot of all these woods. A nook of haunting charm with its sprawling stream, its big-boled and widely scattered trees, its gra.s.s and flowers. "Mossy Dell," she called it, having borrowed the name from an old romance read in breathless fas.h.i.+on in her room.

Slipping out of her saddle and leaving her horse to browse if such pastime suited him, Terry went through the trees and down along the flas.h.i.+ng creek, humming softly, her voice confused with the gurgle of the noisy little stream, her eyes at last growing content.

She was half smiling at some shadowy thought before she had gone twenty paces; she tossed off her hat and let it lie, meaning to come back for it later; she unfastened the scarf about her neck, baring her white throat to the hour's cool invitation, she let her bronze-brown hair down in two loose, curling braids across her shoulders, toying with the ends as she went.

Coming here at troubled moments altered the girl's mood very much as an hour in a quiet cathedral may soothe the soul of the orthodox.

A little further on, lying across the stream and just around another bend, was a great fallen cedar, its giant trunk eight or ten feet through at the base. Approximately it marked the border-line between the Temple Ranch and Ranch Number Ten; it was quite as though the wilderness itself had cast down the big tree across an old trail to indicate a line which must not be crossed.

Upon the top of this supine woodland monarch Terry was accustomed to sit, her back against one of the big limbs, her heels kicking at the mossy sides, while she glanced back and forth from Temple property to Packard land and told herself how much finer was her side than the other.

Just where the tree had fallen the creek-bed was rocky and uneven; the water eddied and whirled and plunged noisily into its pools. Terry, clambering up from her side of the big log, heard only the shouting of the brook. She grasped the dead branches, pulled herself up, slipped a little, got a new foothold; Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her eyes never brighter, popped up on one side of the log just in time with the tick of her destiny's clock.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Terry's head, her face flushed rosily, her eyes never brighter, popped up on one side of the log.]

That is to say just as Steve Packard, climbing up from the other side, thrust his head up above the top. An astonished grunt from Steve who in the first start of the encounter came close to falling backward; a little choking e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n from Terry whose eyes widened wonderfully--and the two of them settled silently into their places on the cedar and stared at each other. Some three or four feet only lay between the brim of Steve's hat and Terry's upturned nose.

"Well?" demanded Terry stiffly.

"Well?" countered Steve.

He regarded her very gravely. He had never had a girl materialize this way out of s.p.a.ce and his own thoughts. This sudden confronting savored of the supernatural; for the moment it set him aback and he was content to stare wonderingly into the sweet gray eyes so near his own and to take note of the curve of her lips, the redness of them, the dimple which, though departed now and, he felt, in hiding, had left a hint of itself behind in its hasty flight.

"If there's one thing I hate worse than a potato-bug," said Terry, "it's a fresh guy! Think you're funny, don't you?"

"Fresh? Funny?"

He lifted his eyebrows. And then, her suspicion clear to him, his gravity departed the way Terry's dimple had gone and he put back his head and laughed. Laughed while the girl with deepening color and darkening eyes looked at him indignantly.