3.5
Comment(s)
560
View
27
Chapters

Good Indian is a foster son of a western ranch owner. Considered as the eldest son, Good Indian plays a pivot role when the family ranch is attacked by scheming, gold prospectors. He is taken by the beauty of one fragile girl who cannot understand the western customs. His partner and supporter, Georgie Howard, quells her love for him, when they both go through the legal battle of the family ranch. Bower gives the reader an excellent portrayal of a man loved by more than one woman. All that entwined with three lovely women with completely different characters, a group of native Americans, and some interesting family dynamics transformed this saga into a good read.

Good Indian Chapter 1 PEACEFUL HART RANCH

It was somewhere in the seventies when old Peaceful Hart woke to a realization that gold-hunting and lumbago do not take kindly to one another, and the fact that his pipe and dim-eyed meditation appealed to him more keenly than did his prospector's pick and shovel and pan seemed to imply that he was growing old. He was a silent man, by occupation and by nature, so he said nothing about it; but, like the wild things of prairie and wood, instinctively began preparing for the winter of his life. Where he had lately been washing tentatively the sand along Snake River, he built a ranch.

His prospector's tools he used in digging ditches to irrigate his new-made meadows, and his mining days he lived over again only in halting recital to his sons when they clamored for details of the old days when Indians were not mere untidy neighbors to be gossiped with and fed, but enemies to be fought, upon occasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was an ideal place for hammocks and romance-a place where dainty maidens might dream their way to womanhood. And Peaceful Hart, when all was done, grew old watching five full-blooded boys clicking their heels unromantically together as they roosted upon the porch, and threw cigarette stubs at the water lilies while they wrangled amiably over the merits of their mounts; saw them drag their blankets out into the broody dusk of the grove when the nights were hot, and heard their muffled swearing under their "tarps" because of the mosquitoes which kept the night air twanging like a stricken harp string with their song.

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

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

Once the gate swung shut upon the grove one blinked in the garish sunlight of the plains. There began the real ranch world. There was the pile of sagebrush fuel, all twisted and gray, pungent as a bottle of spilled liniment, where braided, blanketed bucks were sometimes prevailed upon to labor desultorily with an ax in hope of being rewarded with fruit new-gathered from the orchard or a place at Phoebe's long table in the great kitchen.

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

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

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

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

Then began the desert, a great stretch of unlovely sage and lava rock and sand for mile upon mile, to where the distant mountain ridges reached out and halted peremptorily the ugly sweep of it. The railroad gashed 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 the most aggressive sagebrush and dipping tentatively into hollows, seeking always the easiest way to reach some remote settlement or ranch.

Of the men who followed those trails, not one of them but could have ridden straight to the Peaceful Hart ranch in black darkness; and there were few, indeed, white men or Indians, who could have ridden there at midnight and not been sure of blankets and a welcome to sweeten their sleep. Such was the Peaceful Hart Ranch, conjured from the sage and the sand in the valley of the Snake.

Continue Reading

Other books by B. M. Bower

More

You'll also like

The Billionaire's Cold And Bitter Betrayal

The Billionaire's Cold And Bitter Betrayal

Clara Bennett
5.0

I had just survived a private jet crash, my body a map of violet bruises and my lungs still burning from the smoke. I woke up in a sterile hospital room, gasping for my husband's name, only to realize I was completely alone. While I was bleeding in a ditch, my husband, Adam, was on the news smiling at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. When I tracked him down at the hospital's VIP wing, I didn't find a grieving husband. I found him tenderly cradling his ex-girlfriend, Casie, in his arms, his face lit with a protective warmth he had never shown me as he carried her into the maternity ward. The betrayal went deeper than I could have imagined. Adam admitted the affair started on our third anniversary-the night he claimed he was stuck in London for a merger. Back at the manor, his mother had already filled our planned nursery with pink boutique bags for Casie's "little princess." When I demanded a divorce, Adam didn't flinch. He sneered that I was "gutter trash" from a foster home and that I'd be begging on the streets within a week. To trap me, he froze my bank accounts, cancelled my flight, and even called the police to report me for "theft" of company property. I realized then that I wasn't his partner; I was a charity case he had plucked from obscurity to manage his life. To the Hortons, I was just a servant who happened to sleep in the master bedroom, a "resilient" woman meant to endure his abuse in silence while the whole world laughed at the joke that was my marriage. Adam thought stripping me of his money would make me crawl back to him. He was wrong. I walked into his executive suite during his biggest deal of the year and poured a mug of sludge over his original ten-million-dollar contracts. Then, right in front of his board and his mistress, I stripped off every designer thread he had ever paid for until I was standing in nothing but my own silk camisole. "You can keep the clothes, Adam. They're as hollow as you are." I grabbed my passport, turned my back on his billions, and walked out of that glass tower barefoot, bleeding, and finally free.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book
Good Indian Good Indian B. M. Bower Literature
“Good Indian is a foster son of a western ranch owner. Considered as the eldest son, Good Indian plays a pivot role when the family ranch is attacked by scheming, gold prospectors. He is taken by the beauty of one fragile girl who cannot understand the western customs. His partner and supporter, Georgie Howard, quells her love for him, when they both go through the legal battle of the family ranch. Bower gives the reader an excellent portrayal of a man loved by more than one woman. All that entwined with three lovely women with completely different characters, a group of native Americans, and some interesting family dynamics transformed this saga into a good read.”
1

Chapter 1 PEACEFUL HART RANCH

28/11/2017

2

Chapter 2 GOOD INDIAN

28/11/2017

3

Chapter 3 OLD WIVES TALES

28/11/2017

4

Chapter 4 THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL

28/11/2017

5

Chapter 5 "I DON'T CARE MUCH ABOUT GIRLS"

28/11/2017

6

Chapter 6 THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL PLAYS GHOST

28/11/2017

7

Chapter 7 MISS GEORGIE HOWARD, OPERATOR

28/11/2017

8

Chapter 8 THE AMIABLE ANGLER

28/11/2017

9

Chapter 9 PEPPAJEE JIM "HEAP SABES"

28/11/2017

10

Chapter 10 MIDNIGHT PROWLERS

28/11/2017

11

Chapter 11 "YOU CAN'T PLAY WITH ME"

28/11/2017

12

Chapter 12 "THEM DAMN SNAKE"

28/11/2017

13

Chapter 13 CLOUD-SIGN VERSUS CUPID

28/11/2017

14

Chapter 14 THE CLAIM-JUMPERS

28/11/2017

15

Chapter 15 SQUAW-TALK-FAR-OFF HEAP SMART

28/11/2017

16

Chapter 16 "DON'T GET EXCITED!"

28/11/2017

17

Chapter 17 A LITTLE TARGET-PRACTICE

28/11/2017

18

Chapter 18 A SHOT FROM THE RIM-ROCK

28/11/2017

19

Chapter 19 EVADNA GOES CALLING

28/11/2017

20

Chapter 20 MISS GEORGIE ALSO MAKES A CALL

28/11/2017

21

Chapter 21 SOMEBODY SHOT SAUNDERS

28/11/2017

22

Chapter 22 A BIT OF PAPER

28/11/2017

23

Chapter 23 THE MALICE OF A SQUAW

28/11/2017

24

Chapter 24 PEACEFUL RETURNS

28/11/2017

25

Chapter 25 "I'D JUST AS SOON HANG FOR NINE MEN AS FOR ONE"

28/11/2017

26

Chapter 26 "WHEN THE SUN GOES AWAY"

28/11/2017

27

Chapter 27 LIFE ADJUSTS ITSELF AGAIN TO SOME THINGS

28/11/2017