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.

CHAPTER II. GOOD INDIAN

There is a saying--and if it is not purely Western, it is at least
purely American--that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. In the very
teeth of that, and in spite of the fact that he was neither very good,
nor an Indian--nor in any sense "dead"--men called Grant Imsen "Good
Indian" to his face; and if he resented the title, his resentment was
never made manifest--perhaps because he had