Man to Man

Excerpt

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....