Jackson Gregory

“ The very force with which Steele and Tom Hardy met, the shock of their big panting bodies, precluded thought of a long drawn issue.
Smite, be smitten and smite back again, such is the way that men know how to fight in the land about Hell's Goblet. Strike, strike hard, ignoring all the subtle arts of artificial fistic encounter, for a blow on the cheek return a blow to the jaw, for a cut and bleeding mouth pay back in the coin of a bruised and battered eye, seeking always and always the one consummation of putting the other man down, down to stay. ”

“ Many a time had Beatrice heard Bill Steele laugh. But never was she to forget the sound of his laugh now. He had seen, had marked Embry's springing forward and had thrown down his own gun, laughing! ... She did not know that a man could laugh like that! Laugh for the sheer, pure joy of being able to put out his hands and find with them the man he wanted in them! She did not know that anything could so stir that sleeping, primal something deep down in the depths of her womanhood, that she could stand thus watching them with fierce, burning eyes. ”

“ When an unseen deer went crashing through the brush and struck out, splashing mightily, through the river just beyond a thick clump of red willows, Steele nodded his head in acceptance of a sound he could have expected and looked forward to with an agreeable sense of the fitness of things. Only some eight or nine miles from the Corliss ranch house, little more than half that distance from the Little Giant where men sweated and thundered the silences with blasts of dynamite and black powder, here was the wilderness in untroubled supremacy. ”

“ Embry struck again, viciously snarling, no longer a man of ice and repression. Then for the second time Bill Steele struck as Beatrice had not even guessed he could. Embry was flung back half across the room, his mouth cut by the fierce fist, to lie prone.
The light of battle in Embry's eye flickered and failed and went out, replaced at last by his fear. For one must have sought far throughout the world this morning to have found the man who could have stood up longer before the searing rage which clamoured through every muscle of Bill Steele's body. ”

“ But Beatrice and Bill Steele, their dimly outlined forms vague in the night, were very still. She had noted, and the discovery had set her heart to leaping, that his voice had grown suddenly gruff and that it shook to the words, little, time-worn words, which he had said.
But Beatrice's voice when she answered was as steady as even she could have wished it.
"Is this meant as further insult, Mr. Steele?" she demanded coldly.
"You know better than that," he cried with sudden passion. "Never is there insult in a decent man's offering his love to a woman, no matter who or what she is. ”

“ Johnnie Thorp, enraged, weak from the blow in his face, but not yet accounting himself beaten, was on his knees, his hands groping for the rifle in the grass. Steele swept it away from his clutching fingers, thrusting the man back.
"Damn you," muttered Thorp.
"A man like you, from the looks of you," returned Steele in hot contempt, "ought to be big enough to depend on his hands and leave this sort of sneaking gun play to the indoor sports. Now, stand up if you like and get your wind and I'll knock the eternal daylight out of you."
"Don't you do it, Steele!" warned Turk eagerly. ”

“ A pretty even match in most things were Bill Steele and Tom Hardy, two men who, physically, might have been twin brothers, both big and hard and fearless and quick, both long of arm, steady of eye, deep breasted. From the moment that Turk Wilson's great arms tightened about the legs of his antagonist, drawing him relentlessly down, there was no doubt of the outcome there. For in Turk's wide shouldered, squat, ungainly form there was twice the endurance and power that was to be met in the man who beat and hammered at him, in Turk's soul there was room for two emotions only, rage and confidence. ”

“ And now in Joe Embry's eyes, eyes which so seldom gossiped of what lay in Joe Embry's thought, she read the answer to Steele's look. It was but a flash that came and went with lightning swiftness, and yet in that vital instant it illuminated as brightly as lightning itself illumines the dark heavens, the thing that lay in Joe Embry's soul. Again Beatrice shivered; though she had never seen it before, she recognized it instinctively. It was ugly, naked hatred.
"When two men hate as those two hate!" ”

“ For the Goblet trail ran close to their trunks and from this point on there need be no hesitation. Steele swung down from the saddle. Leading his horse over the uneven ground, climbing in as straight a line as slope and brush would permit, he came in ten minutes to the cedars and their imprisoned rock. A moment he laid a big hand against a massive bole, looking up into the gnarled branches quite as one might turn glad eyes upon the weathered visage of an old friend. Then again he mounted, riding toward the south, keeping well up on the mountainside. ”

“ Steele suddenly threw out his hand, thrusting Embry backward so that he was hurled away from Beatrice's side, so that his shoulders struck against the wall of Hurley's shack. Even Embry, anxious to do his dear lady's bidding, was not the man to suffer that without retaliation. He struck back and though the blow landed square in Steele's chest, Steele scarcely felt it. For his blood was no longer the peaceful blood of the man who made merry war but of the man who hates, hates doubly because he loves elsewhere. ”

“ Meantime Beatrice Corliss, having given Bradford his opportunity for an explanation which failed somewhat to placate her, sought to shut out of her mind all thought of William Steele and his "boorish rudeness." In the first grip of her anger, before she had had time for the nicer selection of a word, she termed him to herself as just "fresh." It had not been her lot before to meet a man like him, a man who in his first talk with her should manifest toward her a degree of unpleasant familiarity so marked and so "insufferable." ”

“ I love you, you know how I love you. We have been the best of friends, you and I; can't we be something more than friends? I have spoken before; I have waited, giving you time to think. Hasn't the time come now? Can't you say what I want you to say, Beatrice?"
He had put out one of his strong, beautiful hands to hers while she stood listening to words which no longer were slow. She had felt the man's force; she had acknowledged, in her anger with Bill Steele, that Embry and she stood together against a common enemy. She was asking herself if she could say what Joe Embry wanted her to say? ”

“ The girl and the man had fallen silent together. Beatrice, unaccustomed to early rising, passed unconsciously from reflection upon the day's plans to a quiet enjoyment of this glowing phase of the day itself. Joe Embry, sitting back loosely, drawing slowly at the cigar she had requested him to smoke, was richly content to ponder his own plans and watch her. And this morning there was reason enough why a leisurely man should be satisfied just to ride with her and look at her. Never more than at this moment had Beatrice Corliss appeared richly alive, glowingly feminine, unquestionably beautiful. ”

“ Beatrice's laughter, as spontaneous as ever his had been, fell pleasantly on his ears, mingling with the musical gurgle of the water.
"You would make it appear, Mr. Steele, that the wilderness is, after all, immensely conventional; that, since I offended it by coming without a chaperone, it takes matters into its own hands. Really, you are the most absurd man I ever heard of! Now, shall the cook look at her province?"
"Just the same," maintained Steele stoutly, looking as grave as before, "it's a sign and a token. Maybe a warning. We'd better look out. ”

“ He drew off his boots, completed his simple preparations for the night, slipped in between his blankets with a big sigh of content.
"When a man can have this sort of thing for nothing," he mused quite as he had done many a time before, quite as many another man had done before Bill Steele came down into the world, "why does he sweat for money to buy himself electric lights that are not in it with the stars, music that tries to copy and can't touch the sound of falling water, a bed that isn't in the same class with a pile of fresh fir boughs or a heap of pine needles?" ”

“ No girl ever lived who knew better than Beatrice Corliss that purely feminine trick of a smile eloquently indicating that she had risen to serene heights very far above him, whence she regarded him confused with other insect life of the earth's grass.
They followed Steele's trail up the river to the slope which led to his tableland, Steele dropping a couple of paces behind her, his eyes showing his admiration now that she could not see it, Beatrice seeking to breathe evenly so that when they came to the top he could not offer further remarks upon her frailty. ”

“ To a healthy young man with a man's sized appetite, there is no more delightful sight in the world than a pretty girl, flushed and bright eyed over dinner getting in his own kitchen ... a statement with a canabalistic ring to it, admittedly, yet none the less a serious truth. Bill Steele stood for a little staring in at her from the outside whither he had withdrawn to give her room for her operations, and Beatrice fighting womanfully for her outward calm in an environment which set her heart in a flutter seemed all unconscious of his near presence. ”

“ The thoughts of a contented man on the verge of drowsing are not usually logically connected.
"That Turk Wilson is a man, a real man," he pondered. "I don't know that either Napoleon or Richard of the Lion Heart had much on him. ... I wonder how little Trixie is going to accept the news?"
And as he went to sleep, conscious of something tranquilly maternal in the brooding solitudes about him, his last thought was of the vanished mother who, when Billy Steele was a very little boy, had held him in her arms before she tucked him in for the good night kiss. ”

“ The other man upon the rock had sprung to his feet at his companion's cry and Steele saw that the two of them, like Johnnie Thorp, were big, man-sized men, the sort to be chosen for just such work as had brought them here. Then, Turk with a little gurgling, throaty curse, Steele with the joyous whoop of some battle waging wild man, the two of them had leaped forward, their eager hands out, rushing in between their visitors and the lone rifle. And, the moment of hesitation over, they were met body to body, unflinchingly, by men who knew how to fight and were not afraid. ”

“ In that ten minutes he penetrated the very citadel of solitude. Between great boulders ten, fifteen feet high, over fallen slabs of granite, under occasional monster pines, at last along a little-used deer trail leading back from the river and to a small, grassy, timbered table-land. Upon a sun-dried mat of fallen pine needles he dropped his saddle, and with a deep sigh of utter content turned toward the west. Yonder, still an hour high above the wooded ridge, was the sun. There, catching only infrequently the sun's slant rays, lay the source of Thunder River. ”

“ A half dozen paces further and he left the sandy margin of the stream, beginning to climb again; his body pressed tight against the rock wall. Here, underfoot, was the natural semblance of a path, never wider than twelve inches, often barely allowing foothold. Upon the cañon's sides were occasional bushes, infrequently patches of brush driving hardy roots into soil filled fissures. By gripping a ledge above his head and drawing himself up, Steele came into one of these clumps of mountain brush, to his cache and its hidden door. ”

“ The red car sped up the valley, was lost to view behind a clump of poplars, reappeared seeming to have achieved ever greater momentum, swept about a turn in a manner to make the man who watched lift his brows, rumbled across a high arched bridge, and with motor drumming shot up the first stage of the graded roadway, again losing itself as a shoulder of the mountain intervened.
Steele rose to his feet expectantly. Booth Stanton had come out of his cabin and walked swiftly toward the courtyard. ”

“ He broke off abruptly, lifting his piercing eyes to hers.
"Dear lady," he continued softly, "the one thing I ask in the world is the joy of serving you. You have come to know that, haven't you? I have never known a woman like you, no surprising thing since there never was another like you created! I thank God that for a little you and I have had one common interest; if I could dare hope that always we might have our interests in common ... Because I have not babbled of it, have you failed to know, Beatrice?" ”

“ Let there be never an available weapon left rusting in its sheath.
"The chef's realm is apart from the king's palace," Steele told her with an assumption of dignified gravity. "Lest smells of onions and hot grease assail the royal nose. There is the kitchen."
He pointed. Beatrice saw it now, though until this moment it had gone unnoticed, so did it blend in with the forest behind it. It was what the folk of Mexico or Southern California would term a ramada, though its walls were of fir boughs instead of willow withes. ”

“ And for that brief, immeasurably brief, fragment of time, so charged was the decrying voice with vibrant denunciation, Beatrice Corliss believed!
Even the calm self-mastery of a Joe Embry must feel to its very roots the shock of such accusation, even the face of a Joe Embry must flush hotly, his eyes cease once more to mask his thought. The man does not live into whose face there does not spring a line of crimson to the whip lash laid across it. ”

“ Little isolated clump of humanity as it was, straggled far out of the way of cities, shut in by the silences of mountain and forest, composed of unsightly houses and tattered tents, with here and there a clean, new, white interloper, it made a name for itself which reached out across the country far in advance of the names of Summit City and Indian City and Bear Town. Like an untoward youngster it commanded attention, thrusting itself noisily forward. ”

“ Denham had wanted her disappearance to pass unnoticed; and Mrs. Denham was going to tell him everything she knew.
He had left the ranch house being drawn into the embrace of the darkness; he returned to it to find that lights blazed everywhere. Riding at a gallop into the courtyard where he was afoot before his horse had fairly come to a standstill, he was greeted by an obvious atmosphere of alarm. He saw through an open door some two or three women, hastily covered with kimonos drawn loosely about them, all talking excitedly. ”