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B. M. Bower
The Ranch At The Wolverine
(Western Adventure Novel)
Adventure Tale of the Wild West
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-2056-4
Table of Contents
Chapter I. Let us Start at the Beginning
Chapter II. A Storm and a Stranger
Chapter III. A Book, a Bannock, and a Bed
Chapter IV. "Old Dame Fortune's Used me for a Football"
Chapter V. Marthy Buries Her Dead and Greets Her Nephew
Chapter VI. A Matter of Twelve Months or so
Chapter VII. Ward Hunts Wolves
Chapter VIII. Help for the Cow Business
Chapter IX. When Emotions are Bottled
Chapter XII. The Little Devils of Doubt
Chapter XIII. The Corral in the Canyon
Chapter XIV. Each in his Own Trail
Chapter XV. "You Won't get me Again"
Chapter XVI. "I'm Going to Take You Out and Hang You"
Chapter XVII. "So-Long, Buck!"
Chapter XVIII. Fortune Kicks Again
Chapter XIX. The Brave Buckaroo
Chapter XX. "We Been Sorry for You"
Chapter XXII. The Billy of her
Chapter XXIII. Billy Louise Gets a Surprise
Chapter XXIV. The Hookin'-Cough Man
Chapter XXVIII. All Right and Comfy
Chapter I. Let us Start at the Beginning
Four trail-worn oxen, their necks bowed to the yoke of patient servitude, should really begin this story. But to follow the trail they made would take several chapters which you certainly would skip—unless you like to hear the tale of how the wilderness was tamed and can thrill at the stern history of those who did the taming while they fought to keep their stomachs fairly well filled with food and their hard-muscled bodies fit for the fray.
There was a woman, low-browed, uncombed, harsh of voice and speech and nature, who drove the four oxen forward over lava rock and rough prairie and the scanty sage. I might tell you a great deal about Marthy, who plodded stolidly across the desert and the low-lying hills along the Blackfoot; and of her weak-souled, shiftless husband whom she called Jase, when she did not call him worse.
They were the pioneers whose lurching wagon first forded the singing Wolverine stream just where it greens the tiny valley and then slips between huge lava-rock ledges to join the larger stream. Jase would have stopped there and called home the sheltered little green spot in the gray barrenness. But Marthy went on, up the farther hill and across the upland, another full day's journey with the sweating oxen.
They camped that night on another little, singing stream, in another little valley, which was not so level or so green or so wholly pleasing to the eye. And that night two of the oxen, impelled by a surer instinct than their human owners, strayed away down a narrow, winding gorge and so discovered the Cove and feasted upon its rich grasses. It was Marthy who went after them and who recognized the little, hidden Eden as the place of her dreams—supposing she ever had dreams. So Marthy and Jase and the four oxen took possession, and with much labor and many hard years for the woman, and with the same number of years and as little labor as he could manage on the man's part, they tamed the Cove and made it a beauty spot in that wild land. A beauty spot, though their lives held nothing but treadmill toil and harsh words
