Man to Man

Man to Man, by Jackson Gregory

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Title: Man to Man
Author: Jackson Gregory
Release Date: July 29, 2006 [EBook #18933]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by Al Haines

[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