Good Indian

by B. M. Bower

  Produced by Ken Smidge

  GOOD INDIAN

  by B. M. Bower

  1912

  Contents:

  I PEACEFUL HART RANCH II GOOD INDIAN III OLD WIVES' TALES IV THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL V "I DON'T CARE MUCH ABOUT GIRLS" VI THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL PLAYS GHOST VII MISS GEORGIE HOWARD, OPERATOR VIII THE AMIABLE ANGLER IX PEPPAJEE JIM "HEAP SABES" X MIDNIGHT PROWLERS XI "YOU CAN'T PLAY WITH ME" XII "THEM DAMN' SNAKE" XIII CLOUD-SIGN VERSUS CUPID XIV THE CLAIM-JUMPERS XV SQUAW-TALK-FAR-OFF HEAP SMART XVI "DON'T GET EXCITED!" XVII A LITTLE TARGET PRACTICE XVIII A SHOT FROM THE RIM-ROCK XIX EVADNA GOES CALLING XX MISS GEORGIE ALSO MAKES A CALL XXI SOMEBODY SHOT SAUNDERS XXII A BIT OF PAPER XXIII THE MALICE OF A SQUAW XXIV PEACEFUL RETURN XXV "I'D JUST AS SOON HANG FOR NINE MEN AS FOR ONE" XXVI "WHEN THE SUN GOES AWAY" XXVII LIFE ADJUSTS ITSELF AGAIN TO SMALL THINGS

  GOOD INDIAN

  CHAPTER I. PEACEFUL HART RANCH

  It was somewhere in the seventies when old Peaceful Hart woke to arealization that gold-hunting and lumbago do not take kindly to oneanother, and the fact that his pipe and dim-eyed meditation appealed tohim more keenly than did his prospector's pick and shovel and pan seemedto imply that he was growing old. He was a silent man, by occupationand by nature, so he said nothing about it; but, like the wild thingsof prairie and wood, instinctively began preparing for the winter of hislife. Where he had lately been washing tentatively the sand along SnakeRiver, he built a ranch. His prospector's tools he used in diggingditches to irrigate his new-made meadows, and his mining days he livedover again only in halting recital to his sons when they clamored fordetails of the old days when Indians were not mere untidy neighbors tobe gossiped with and fed, but enemies to be fought, upon occasion.

  They felt that fate had cheated them--did those five sons; for they hadbeen born a few years too late for the fun. Not one of them would everhave earned the title of "Peaceful," as had his father. Nature hadplayed a joke upon old Peaceful Hart; for he, the mildest-manneredman who ever helped to tame the West when it really needed taming, hadsomehow fathered five riotous young males to whom fight meant fun--andthe fiercer, the funnier.

  He used to suck at his old, straight-stemmed pipe and regard them with abewildered curiosity sometimes; but he never tried to put his puzzlementinto speech. The nearest he ever came to elucidation, perhaps, was whenhe turned from them and let his pale-blue eyes dwell speculativelyupon the face of his wife, Phoebe. Clearly he considered that she wasresponsible for their dispositions.

  The house stood cuddled against a rocky bluff so high it dwarfed thewhole ranch to pygmy size when one gazed down from the rim, and so steepthat one wondered how the huge, gray bowlders managed to perch uponits side instead of rolling down and crushing the buildings to dust andfragments. Strangers used to keep a wary eye upon that bluff, as ifthey never felt quite safe from its menace. Coyotes skulked there, andtarantulas and "bobcats" and snakes. Once an outlaw hid there for days,within sight and hearing of the house, and stole bread from Phoebe'spantry at night--but that is a story in itself.

  A great spring gurgled out from under a huge bowlder just behind thehouse, and over it Peaceful had built a stone milk house, where Phoebespent long hours in cool retirement on churning day, and where one wentto beg good things to eat and to drink. There was fruit cake alwayshidden away in stone jars, and cheese, and buttermilk, and cream.

  Peaceful Hart must have had a streak of poetry somewhere hidden away inhis silent soul. He built a pond against the bluff; hollowed it out fromthe sand he had once washed for traces of gold, and let the big springfill it full and seek an outlet at the far end, where it slid away undera little stone bridge. He planted the pond with rainbow trout, and onthe margin a rampart of Lombardy poplars, which grew and grew until theythreatened to reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds.Their slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers, far up the bluff whenthe sun sank low in the afternoon.

  Behind them grew a small jungle of trees-catalpa and locust amongthem--a jungle which surrounded the house, and in summer hid it fromsight entirely.

  With the spring creek whispering through the grove and away to where itwas defiled by trampling hoofs in the corrals and pastures beyond, andwith the roses which Phoebe Hart kept abloom until the frosts came, andthe bees, and humming--birds which somehow found their way across theparched sagebrush plains and foregathered there, Peaceful Hart's ranchbetrayed his secret longing for girls, as if he had unconsciouslyplanned it for the daughters he had been denied.

  It was an ideal place for hammocks and romance--a place where daintymaidens might dream their way to womanhood. And Peaceful Hart, when allwas done, grew old watching five full-blooded boys clicking theirheels unromantically together as they roosted upon the porch, and threwcigarette stubs at the water lilies while they wrangled amiably over themerits of their mounts; saw them drag their blankets out into the broodydusk of the grove when the nights were hot, and heard their muffledswearing under their "tarps" because of the mosquitoes which kept thenight air twanging like a stricken harp string with their song.

  They liked the place well enough. There were plenty of shady placesto lie and smoke in when the mercury went sizzling up its tiny tube.Sometimes, when there was a dance, they would choose the best ofPhoebe's roses to decorate their horses' bridles; and perhaps theirhatbands, also. Peaceful would then suck harder than ever at his pipe,and his faded blue eyes would wander pathetically about the littleparadise of his making, as if he wondered whether, after all, it hadbeen worth while.

  A tight picket fence, built in three unswerving lines from the postplanted solidly in a cairn of rocks against a bowlder on the eastern rimof the pond, to the road which cut straight through the ranch, down thatto the farthest tree of the grove, then back to the bluff again, shut inthat tribute to the sentimental side of Peaceful's nature. Outside thefence dwelt sturdier, Western realities.

  Once the gate swung shut upon the grove one blinked in the garishsunlight of the plains. There began the real ranch world. There was thepile of sagebrush fuel, all twisted and gray, pungent as a bottleof spilled liniment, where braided, blanketed bucks were sometimesprevailed upon to labor desultorily with an ax in hope of being rewardedwith fruit new-gathered from the orchard or a place at Phoebe's longtable in the great kitchen.

  There was the stone blacksmith shop, where the boys sweated over thenice adjustment of shoes upon the feet of fighting, wild-eyed horses,which afterward would furnish a spectacle of unseemly behavior under thesaddle.

  Farther away were the long stable, the corrals where broncho-taming wassimply so much work to be performed, hayfields, an orchard or two, thenrocks and sand and sage which grayed the earth to the very skyline.

  A glint of slithering green showed where the Snake hugged the bluff amile away, and a brown trail, ankle-deep in dust, stretched straight outto the west, and then lost itself unexpectedly behind a sharp, juttingpoint of rocks where the bluff had thrust out a rugged finger into thevalley.

  By devious turnings and breath-taking climbs, the trail finally reachedthe top at the only point for miles, where it was possible for ahorseman to pass up or down.

  Then began the desert, a great stretch of unlovely sage and lava rockand sand for mile upon mile, to where the distant mountain ridgesreached out and halted peremptorily the ugly sweep of it. The railroadgashed it boldly, after the manner of the iron trail of modern industry;but the trails of the desert dwellers wound through it diffidently,avoiding the rough crest of lava rock where they might, dodging themost aggressive sagebrush and dipping tentatively into hollows, seekingalways the easiest way to reach some remote settlement or ranch.
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  Of the men who followed those trails, not one of them but could haveridden straight to the Peaceful Hart ranch in black darkness; and therewere few, indeed, white men or Indians, who could have ridden there atmidnight and not been sure of blankets and a welcome to sweeten theirsleep. Such was the Peaceful Hart Ranch, conjured from the sage and thesand in the valley of the Snake.