THE MAN-BREAKER AT HOME
In a short time the cattle country had come to know a good deal of
Steve Packard, son of the late Philip Packard, grandson of Old Man
Packard, variously known. Red Creek gossiped within its limits and
sent forth word of a quarrel of some sort with Blenham, a winning game
of seven-and-a-half, a fight with big Joe Woods. Red Creek was
inclined to set the seal of approval on this new Packard, for Red
Creek, on both sides of its quarrelsome street, stood ready to say that
a man was a man even when it might go gunning for him.
As the days went by Packard's fame grew. There were tales that in a
savage mêlée with Blenham he had eliminated that capable individual's
right eye; and though there were those who had had it from some of the
Ranch Number Ten boys that Blenham's loss was the result of an
accident, still it remained unquestioned that Blenham had suffered
injury at Packard's ranch and had been driven forth from it.
Then, Packard had followed Blenham to the logging-camp; he had tackled
the crowd headed by Joe Woods; he had come remarkably close to killing
Woods; he had broken up the camp and sent the timberjacks on their way.
He had had a horse killed under him; he had quarrelled with his
grandfather; he was standing on his own feet. In brief--
"He's a sure enough, out an' out Packard!" they said of him.
To be sure, while there were men who spoke well of him there were
others, perhaps as many, who spoke ill. There were the barkeeper of
the Ace of Diamonds, Joe Woods, Blenham; they had their friends and
hangers-on. On the other hand, offsetting these, there were old
friends whom Steve had not seen for twelve or more years.
Such was Brocky Lane whose cowboy had loaned Steve a horse which had
been killed on the Red Creek road. Young Packard promptly paid for the
animal and resumed auld lang syne with the hearty, generous Brocky Lane.
What men had to say of him came last of all to Steve. But some fifty
miles to the north of Ranch Number Ten, on the far-flung acres of the
biggest stock-ranch in the State, there was another Packard to whom
rumors came swiftly. And this was because the old grandfather went far
out of his way upon every opportunity to learn of his grandson's
activities.
"What for a man is he growed up to be, anyhow?" was what Hell-Fire
Packard was interested in ascertaining.
When the old man wanted to get anywhere he ordered out his car and Guy
Little. When he wanted information he sent for Guy Little. The
undersized mechanician was gifted with eyes which could see, ears which
could hear, and a tongue which could set matters clear; he must have
been unusually keen to have retained his position in the old man's
household for the matter of five or six years.
To his employer he had come once upon a time, half-starved and weary, a
look of dread in his eyes which had the way of turning swiftly over his
shoulder; the old man had had from the beginning the more than
suspicion that the little fellow was a fugitive from the law and in a
hurry at that.
He had immediately taken him in and given him succor and comfort. The
poor devil fumbled for a name and was so obviously making himself a new
one that Packard dubbed him Guy Little on the spot, simply because, he
explained, he was such a little guy. And thereafter the two grew in
friendship.
Guy Little's first coming had been opportune. The old man had only
recently bought his first touring-car; in haste to be gone somewhere
his motor failed to respond to his first coaxing and subsequent bursts
of violent rage. While he was cursing it, reviling it, shaking his
fist at it, and vowing he'd set a keg of giant powder under the thing
and blow it clean to blue blazes, Guy Little ran a loving hand over it,
stroked its mane, so to speak, whispered in its ear, and set the engine
purring. Old Man Packard nodded; they two, big-bodied millionaire and
dwarfed waif, needed each other.
"Climb on the runnin'-board, Guy Little," he said right then. "You go
wherever I go." And later he came to say of his mechanician, "Him?
Why, man, he can take four ol' wagon wheels an' a can of gasoline an'
make the damn' thing go. He's all automobile brains, that's what Guy
Little is!"
On the Big Bend ranch, the old man's largest and favorite of several
kindred holdings, an outfit which flung its twenty thousand acres this
way and that among the Little Hills and on either side of the upper
waters of the stream which eventually gave its name to Red Creek, the
oldest of the name of Packard had summoned Guy Little.
It was some ten days after the stopping of all activity in the Ranch
Number Ten lumbercamp. He had been sitting alone in his library,
smoking a pipe, and staring out of his window and across his fields.
Suddenly he sprang to his feet, went to his door, and shouted down the
long hall:
"Ho, there! Guy Little!"
The house was big; rooms had been added now and then at intervals
during the last thirty or forty years; the master's library was of
generous dimensions and could have stabled a herd of fifty horses.
This chamber was in the southwest corner of the rambling edifice; Guy
Little's quarters were diagonally across the building. But Packard
asked no tinkling electric bell; as usual he was content to stick his
head out into the hall and yell in that big, booming voice of his:
"Ho, there! Guy Little, come here!"
Having voiced his command he went back to his deep leather chair and
refilled his pipe. It was the time of early dusk; not yet were the
coal-oil lamps lighted; shadows were lengthening and merging out in the
rolling fields. Packard's eyes, withdrawn from the outdoors, wandered
along his tall and seldom-used book-shelves, fell to the one worn
volume on the table beside him, went hastily to the door. Down the
hall came the sound of quick boot-heels. He took up the single volume
and thrust it out of sight under the leather cushion of his chair. The
mechanician was in the room before he could get his pipe lighted.
"You called, m'lord?"
Guy Little stood drawn up to make the most of his very inconsiderable
height, eyes straight ahead, hands at sides, chin elevated and
stationary. Nothing was plainer than that he aped the burlesqued
English butler--unless it be that it was even more obvious that in his
chosen role he was a ridiculous failure. There never was the man less
designed by nature for the part than Guy Little.
And yet he insisted; in the beginning of his relationship with his
employer, his soul swelling with gratitude, his imagination touched by
the splendors into which his fate had led him, awed by the dominant
Packard, he had wanted always upon an occasion like this to demand
stiffly:
"You rang, your majesty?"
Packard had cursed and threatened and brow-beaten him down to----
"You called, m'lord?"
But not even old Hell-Fire Packard could get him any further.
"Yes, I called," grunted the old man. "I hollered my head off at you.
I want to know what you foun' out. Let's have it."
Guy Little made his little butler-bow.
"Your word is law, m'lord," he said, once more rigid and unbending.
Although Packard knew this very well without being told and had known
it a good many years before Guy Little had been born, and although Guy
Little had repeated the phrase time without number, the old man
accepted it peacefully as a necessary though utterly damnable
introduction.
"It's like this," continued the mechanician. "Not knowin' what you
thought an' not even knowin' what you wanted to think, an' figgerin' to
play safe, I've picked up the dope all over. Which is sayin' I bought
drinks on both sides the street, whiskey at Whitey Wimble's joint an'
more of the same at Dan Hodges's. An' I foun' out several things,
m'lord. If it is your wish----"
"Spit 'em out, Guy Little! What for a man is he?"
"Firs'," said Guy Little, shifting his feet the fraction of an inch so
that his chin bore directly upon Packard, "he's a scrapper. He beat up
Joe Woods, a bigger man than him; later he took part in some sort of a
party durin' which, like is beknown to you, somebody gouged Blenham's
eye out; after that, single-handed, he cleaned out your lumber-camp,
fifteen men countin' Blenham. Tally one, he's a scrapper."
For an instant it seemed that all of the light there was in the swiftly
darkening room had centred in the blue eyes under the old man's bushy
white brows. He drew deeply upon his pipe.
"Go on, Guy Little," he ordered. "What more? Spit it out, man."
"Nex'," reported the little man, "he's a born gambler. If he wasn't he
wouldn't of tied into a game of buckin' you; he wouldn't of played
seven-an'-a-half like he did in at the Ace of Diamonds; he wouldn't of
took them long chances tacklin' Woodsy's timberjacks before breakfas'.
Scrapper an' gambler. That's tally one an' two."
The old man frowned heavily, his teeth remaining tight clamped on his
pipestem as he cried sharply:
"That's it! You've said it: gambler! Drat the boy, I knowed he had it
in his blood. An' it'll ruin him, ruin him. Guy Little, as it would
ruin any man. We got to get that fool gamblin' spirit out'n him. A
man that's always takin' chances never gets anywhere; take a chance an'
you ain't got a chance! That's the way of it, Guy Little! Go on,
though. What else about him?"
"He's a good sport," went on the news-gatherer, "an' he don't ask no
help from nobody. He stan's on his two feet like a man, m'lord. When
he sees a row ahead he don't go to the law with it; no, m'lord; no
indeed, m'lord. He says 'Hell with the law!' Like a man would, like
me an' you . . . an' he kills his own rats himself."
"That's the Packard of him! For, by God, Guy Little, he is a Packard
even if he has got a wrong start! Rich man's son--silver-spoon
stuff--why, it would spoil a better man than you ever saw! Didn't I
spoil my son Phil that-a-way? Didn't Phil start out spoilin' his son
Stephen that same way? But he's a Packard--an'--an'----"
"An' what, m'lord?"
The old man's fist fell heavily on the arm of his chair.
"An' I'm still hopin' he's goin' to be a damn' good Packard at that!
But you go on, Guy Little. What else?"
"Sorta reckless, he is," resumed Guy Little. "But that's purty near
the same thing as havin' the gamblin' spirit, ain't it? Nex' an'
final, m'lord, he's got what you might call an eye for a good-lookin'
girl."
"The devil you say, Guy Little!" The old man, beginning to settle in
his chair, sat bolt upright. "Is some female woman tryin' to get her
hooks in my gran'son already? Name her to me, sir!"
"Name of Temple," said Little. "Terry Temple as they call her, an' a
sure good-lookin' party, if you ask me! Classy from eyes to ankles an'
when it comes to----"
"Hold on, Guy Little!" exploded old man Packard, leaping to his feet,
towering high above the little man, who looked up at him with an
earnest and placid expression. "That wench, that she-devil, that
Jezebel! Settin' her traps for my boy Stephen, is she? Why, man
alive, she ain't fit to scrape the corral-mud off'n his boots. She's a
low-down, deceitful jade, that's what she is, sired by a
sheep-stealin', throat-cuttin', ornery, no-'count, worthless cuss! The
whole pack of them Temples, he an' she of 'em, big an' little of 'em,
ought to be strung up on the firs' tree! The low-down bunch of little
prairie dawgs, tryin' to trap a Packard with puttin' a putty-faced fool
girl in their snare. I say, Guy Little, I'll make the whole crowd of
'em hunt their holes!"
And he hurled his pipe from him so that on the hearthstone it broke
into many pieces.
Now that was a long speech for old man Packard and Guy Little listened
interestedly. At the end, when the old man went growling back to his
chair, the mechanician took up his tale.
"She's purty, though," he maintained. "Like a picture!"
"Doll-faced," snorted the old man, who had not the least idea what
Terry Temple looked like, not having laid his eyes on her for the
matter of years. "Dumpy, pudgy, squidge-nosed little fool. I'll run
both her and her thief of a father out of the country."
"An'," continued Guy Little, "I didn't exac'ly' say, m'lord, as how
this Terry Temple party was after him. I said as how he was after her!
That is, as how, roundin' out what I know about him, he's got a eye for
a fine-lookin' lady. Which, against argyment, I maintain that Terry
Temple girl is."
"Guy Little," cried Packard sharply, "you're a fool! Maybe you know
all there is about motor-cars an' gasoline. When it comes to females
you're a fool."
"Ah, m'lord, not so!" protested Guy Little, a gleam in his eye like a
faint flicker from a dead fire. "There was a time--before I set these
hoofs of mine into the wanderin' trail--when----"
The rest might best be left entirely to the imagination and there he
left it. But the old man was all untouched by his henchman's utterance
and innuendoed boast for the simple reason that he had heard nothing of
it.
"Those Temple hounds," he muttered, staring at Guy Little who stared
butlerishly back, "are leeches, parasites, cursed bloodsuckers and
hangers-on. They think I'm goin' to take this boy in an' give him all
I got; they think they see a chance to marry him into their rotten
crowd an' slip one over on me this way! That simperin', gigglin' fool
of a girl try an' hook my gran'son! I'll show 'em, Guy Little; I'll
show the whole cussed pack of 'em! I'll exterminate 'em, root an'
branch an' withered leaf! By the Lord, but I'll go get 'em!"
"He'll do it," nodded Guy Little, addressing the invisible third party
in order not to directly interrupt his patron's flow of words.
But for a little the old man was silent, running his calloused fingers
nervously through his beard, frowning into the dusk thickening over the
world outside. When he spoke again it was softly, thoughtfully, almost
tenderly. And the words were these:
"Break a fool an' make a man, Guy Little! That's what we're goin' to
do for Stephen Packard. He's always had too much money, had life too
easy. We'll jus' nacherally bust him all to pieces; we'll learn him
the big lesson of life; we'll make a man out'n him yet. An' when
that's done, Guy Little, when that time comes-- Go send Blenham here,"
he broke off with sharp abruptness.
Guy Little achieved his stage bow and departed. The door only half
closed behind him, he was shouting at the top of his voice:
"Hey, Blenham! Oh, Blenham! On the jump. Packard wants you!"
The door slammed behind him. His back once turned on "m'lord," Guy
Little did not wait to get out of earshot to become less butler than
human sparrow.
Blenham needed but the one summons and that might almost have been
whispered. He was fidgeting in his own room, waiting for this moment,
knowing that he was to receive definite instructions concerning Stephen
Packard. Over his right eye was a patch; his face was still a sickly
pallor; his one good eye burned with a sullen flame which never went
out.
Guy Little was the one human being in the world with whom the old man
talked freely, to whom he unburdened himself. With his chief
lieutenant Blenham he was, as with other men, short, crisp-worded,
curt. Now, seeming to take no stock of Blenham's disfigurement, in a
dozen snapping sentences he issued his orders.
Their gist was plain. Blenham was to go the limit to accomplish two
purposes: the minor one of making the world a dreary place for certain
scoundrels, name of Temple; the major one of utterly breaking Steve
Packard. When Blenham went out and to his own room again the sullen
fire in his good eye burned more brightly, as though with fresh fuel.
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 illustrations; it was a tale of love, its
_mise en scène_ 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 cushion.
"'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.