Dark Horse - A Story of the Flying U

By B. M. Bower

This is B. M. Bower's 1931 novel, "Dark Horse - A Story of the Flying U". Big Medicine was a hero among the cowhands of the Flying U after he saved the stranger on horseback who had been struck by lightning. However, their mysterious guest seemed to have amnesia and couldn't remember who he was. A fantastic sequel to "Chip of the Flying U", "Dark Horse" is not to be missed by fans of Bower's wonderful work. Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan (1871 - 1940), more commonly known as B. M. Bower, was an American author famous for her novels, short stories, and screenplays set in the American Old West. Other notable works by this author include: "Casey Ryan", (1921), "The Long Loop" (1931), and "Chip of the Flying U" (1906). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction and biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Classic Western Fiction Library
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473346222

Book preview

Dark Horse

A Story of the Flying U

by

B M Bower

Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

Contents

B. M. Bower

The History of Western Fiction

CHAPTER ONE - THE LIGHTNING STRIKES

CHAPTER TWO - HERO FOR A NIGHT

CHAPTER THREE - FAME IS FLEETING

CHAPTER FOUR - THE UNWELCOME GUEST

CHAPTER FIVE - RED LOCO

CHAPTER SIX - ALL IN THE SAME BOAT

CHAPTER SEVEN - AND PULLING TOGETHER

CHAPTER EIGHT - PEACE IS THE WORD

CHAPTER NINE - VICTIM NUMBER ONE

CHAPTER TEN - LEN TAKES A HAND

CHAPTER ELEVEN - NAMELESS LOVES SOLITUDE

CHAPTER TWELVE - WHISTLING RUFUS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - BIG MEDICINE DECLARES WAR

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - ANDY TELLS A SECRET

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - TROUBLE IN PLENTY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - IT COULD HAVE BEEN A ROCK

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE NATIVE SON

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - RUFUS RECALLS SOMETHING

CHAPTER NINETEEN - LOPING LARRY JONES

CHAPTER TWENTY - LEN LEARNS SEVERAL THINGS

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - HONESTY IS SLOW TO SUSPECT

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - NO MORE DARK HORSES

B. M. Bower

Bertha Muzzy Bower was born Bertha Muzzy on 15 November 1871 in Otter Tail Country, Minnesota. In 1889, she moved with her family to a dryland homestead near Great Falls, Montana. Shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she began working as a school teacher in Milligan Valley. She worked there for one term before returning home, but used her experiences when describing school teachers in her novels.

In December 1890, she surprised her family by eloping with Clayton J Bower. The marriage was an unhappy one. After living with her family and in Great Falls, they finally settled in Big Sandy, Montana in 1898. It was living in Big Sandy that gave Bower an intimate knowledge of cowboy life and the open range. They had three children: Bertha Grace (1891), Harold Clayton (1893) and Roy Noel (1896). The family moved to a hayfield cabin, which Bower unhappily nicknamed Bleak Cabin. To afford the rent, the family took in Bill Sinclair, with whom Bower began a relationship. She lent him books and helped him with his writing, and he taught her about cowboy life and critiqued her early work.

Her first marriage deteriorated after she published Chip of the Flying U (1906). Her husband began calling her his ‘little red-headed gold mine’. The marriage ended after he returned home in a drunken rage. Using money lent to her by Sinclair and money she had earned from her writing, she moved to Tacoma, Washington to stay with her brother. The divorce was finalised in 1905, Clayton took custody of the elder children, and Bower received custody of Roy, with whom she returned to Great Falls. During this time, her career continued to blossom and she signed her first short story writing contract for Popular Magazine in January 1905.

Bower married Sinclair in August 1905 and had a daughter, Della Frances Sinclair, during a blizzard in January 1907. This same winter destroyed their breeding horse herd in eastern Valley Country and ruined their plans to move there in the spring. Instead, they moved to Santa Cruz, California. By 1911, the relationship between them had waned and they separated, Bower moving to San Jose, California. She also changed publishers and signed with the prestigious company, Little, Brown & Company.

In 1920, Bower moved to Hollywood where she married Robert ‘Bud’ Cowan, a cowboy she had met in Big Sandy. In 1921, they reopened a silver mine in Nevada and ran it until the Great Depression compelled them to move to Depoe Bay, Oregon. Their marriage lasted until Cowan’s death in 1939.

Bower claimed she began writing to survive her first marriage and to gain financial independence. Her first novel, published locally, was Strike of the Deadpan Brigade (1901), and her first short story published nationally was Ghost in the Red Shirt (1904). Later that year her first Western novel, Chip of the Flying U, was published as a serial in Popular Magazine. It depicted life on Flying U Ranch and the relationship between the cowboy, Chip, and Dr Della Whitmore. The book was so successful that in 1906, it was republished in hardcover with three watercolour illustrations by Charlie Russell. The book made her famous and she went on to write a series set within the Flying U Ranch.

Bower wrote 57 Western novels. The titles included: Cow Country (1921), The Lonesome Trail (1909), and Pirates of the Ranch (1937). Her novels accurately portrayed cowboy life and she wrote factually, using her first-hand knowledge. Her novels were light-hearted, humorous and contained little violence. Due to their popularity, some of her novels were adapted in Hollywood. Chip of the Flying U was adapted four times and each adaptation changed her narrative. She also collaborated with director, Colin Campbell, writing short stories and screenplays under the name Bertha Muzzy Sinclair. She used her experiences working in studios as a source for several of her novels, including Jean of the Lonely A (1915) and The Phantom Herd (1915).

Bower died on 23 July 1940 in Los Angeles, California at age 68. By the time of her death, she had sold more than two million copies of her novels, not including her short stories or articles.

The History of Western Fiction

Western fiction is a genre which focuses on life in the American Old West. It was popularised through novels, films, magazines, radio, and television and included many staple characters, such as the cowboy, the gunslinger, the outlaw, the lawman and the damsel in distress. The genre’s popularity peaked in the early twentieth century due to dime novels and Hollywood adaptations of Western tales, such as The Virginian, The Great Moon Rider and The Great K.A. Train Robbery. Western novels remained popular through the 1960s, however readership began to dwindle during the 1970s.

The term the American Old West (the Wild West) usually refers to the land west of the Mississippi River and the Frontier between the settled and civilised and the open, lawless lands that resulted as the United States expanded to the Pacific Ocean. This area was largely unknown and little populated until the period between the 1860s and the 1890s when, after the American Civil War, settlement and the frontier moved west.

The Western novel was a relatively new genre which developed from the adventure and exploration novels that had appeared before it. Two predecessors of popular Western fiction writers were Meriweather Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clarke (1770-1838). Both men were explorers and were the first to make travel and the frontier a central theme of their work. Perhaps the most popular predecessor of Western fiction was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). His west was idealised and romantic and his popular Leatherstockings series depicted the fight between the citizens of the frontier and the harsh wilderness that surrounded them. His titles included: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). His tales were often set on the American frontier, then in the Appalachian Mountains and in the land to the west of that. His protagonists lived off the land, were loyal, free, skilled with weapons, and avoided civilised society as best they could. His most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans, also idealised the Native American.

During the 1860s and 1870s, a new generation of Western writers appeared, such as Mark Twain (1835-1910) Roughing It (1872) and Bret Harte (1836-1902) The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868). Both writers had spent time living in the west and continued to promote its appeal through their literature. Harte is often credited with developing many of the cult Western’s stock characters, such as the honest and beautiful dance hall girl, the suave conman and the honourable outlaw. These characters went on to be firm favourites in popular, mass produced Western fiction. At the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of people were undergoing the treacherous journey to the west to make a new life for themselves and the fictional stories and legends of heroes and villains who had survived in this wild landscape captured the imagination of the public.

Western novels became popular in England and throughout America through ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and Dime Novels. These appeared in the late 1800s and were texts that could be bought cheaply (for either a penny or a dime – ten cents) as they were often cheaply printed on a large scale by publishers such as Irwin P. Beadle. Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) by Ann S Stephens (1810-1886) is considered by many critics to be the first dime novel. These sensationalist dime and penny novels capitalised on stories of outlaws, lawmen, cowboys, and mountain men taming the western frontier. Many were fictional, but some were based on real heroes of the west such as Buffalo Bill (the scout, bison hunter and performer), Jesse James (the American outlaw, robber, gang leader and murderer) and Billy the Kid (the American gunfighter). By 1877, these Western characters were a recurring feature of the dime novel. The hero was often a man of action who saved damsels in distress and righted the wrongs of the villains that he faced. For this hero, honour was the most important thing and it was something that the dime heroes never relinquished.

In the 1900s, Pulp magazines helped relay these tales over to Europe where non-Americans also picked up the genre, such as the German writer, Karl May (1842-1912). Pulp magazines were a descendent of the dime novel and their content was largely aimed at a mass market. As their popularity grew, they were able to specialise and there were Pulp magazines devoted specifically to Westerns, such as Cowboy Stories, Ranch Romances, and Star Western. The popularity for these magazines and for Western films in the 1920s made the genre a popular phenomenon.

The status of the genre in the early twentieth century was also enhanced by particular novels by different writers. One of the most influential Western novels was The Virginians (1902) by Owen Wister (1860-1938) which was considered to be a ground breaking literary Western. Wister dismissed the traditional idea of the solitary pioneer conquering new lands and making a new life for himself, and replaced this traditional character with the cowboy. The cowboy was a mix of cultural ideals, such as southern chivalry, western primitivism and stout independence. These were characteristics that many Americans cherished. Wister contrasted the lawlessness of the West to the order and civilisation of the East. He introduced new characters, such as savages and bandits who attacked the more civilised Eastern characters. His cowboy heroes shared many features with the medieval knights – they rode horses, carried weapons, fought duals and valued their honour above all other attributes. Zane Grey’s (1872-1939) Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was also a popular Western novel. Grey was a prolific writer and wrote over ninety books which helped shape Western fiction. He changed Wister’s cowboy into a gunslinger who was feared by criminals and held in awe by other civilians. Other popular Western writers in this period include Andy Adams (1859-1935) whose titles include The Outlet (1905) and A Texas Matchmaker (1904), Edward S Ellis (1840-1916) who wrote Seth Jones, or The Captives of the Frontier (1860) and The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), and Bertha Muzzy Bower (1871-1940) who wrote Chip of the Flying U (1906) and The Dry Ridge Gang (1935).

The Western hero lived in an environment where climate, natives and the terrain could be his enemies, and it was his job to tame the wilderness around him, but in doing so he determined his own extinction. In bringing forward civilisation and settlement, they brought about their own demise and their reason for existing. Western heroes could only exist on the frontier. Rebels were popular heroes in the Western novel and these heroes were often compassionate to those less fortunate than themselves and fought for the downtrodden. They were loyal, idealistic, independent, and knew the difference between right and wrong. They fought for the good and made personal sacrifices in order that good would triumph. The hostile setting of the Wild West transformed the characters into survivors as they were forced to alter themselves in order to live in this new setting. The Old Wild West captured the attention of many as it exemplified the spirit of freedom, individualism, adventure and unspoiled nature. It depicted a world that was separate from organised, urban society and showed the life of the wilderness, frontier and its inhabitants. The Western romanticised American history and the treacherous, mysterious and otherworldly Old West.

CHAPTER ONE

THE LIGHTNING STRIKES

Loping along the trail that scalloped over foothill ridges between Meeker’s ranch and the Flying U, Big Medicine sweated and cursed the month of April for arrogating to itself the sultry heat of July. The cigarette he had rolled and lighted before mounting for the homeward ride was smoked to its stub. It did not seem worth while to light another. What Big Medicine craved most was a quart bottle of cold beer. Failing that, his thoughts kept recurring to the trickle of cold spring water down his gullet. Following that thought his head swung involuntarily to the left, where a faint stock trail angled down a barren ridge into One Man Coulee. And without any command to do so, his sorrel horse, Cheater, turned in response to the glance and began picking his way through rock rubble on that trail. A trivial incident on an unimportant ride; yet such are the inscrutable ways of destiny that the turning aside to drink from a certain spring he knew was not the small matter it seemed to Big Medicine. He was not the man to shy from anything in the trail he chose to ride; one glimpse into the future, and even the blatant courage of Big Medicine must certainly have fled the thing before him.

That glimpse was not offered. So Big Medicine and his sorrel horse, Cheater, went down into One Man Coulee and drank with an audible gusto from the spring seeping out beneath a bulging, moss-covered ledge: Big Medicine lying flat on his belly, mouth and sun-burned nose submerged in the clear pool, Cheater, fetlock deep in the ooze, knees bent while he sucked the cold water avidly through flaccid lips and big yellow teeth. Big Medicine lifted his face to the blasting sun, stared at the heat waves radiating from the rock walls near by, and drank again. Then he pulled off his big Stetson and soused his bullet head three times to his collar. He got up gasping and blowing luxuriously, dragged Cheater back out of the mud where yellow jackets were crawling, made himself a cigarette and heaved himself reluctantly to the saddle.

From the spring his best trail lay down the coulee, following the narrow, brushy water-course to the gravelly road that cut across the coulee’s mouth on its way to certain remote ranches and that forbidding wilderness known as the Badlands. Refreshed, the sorrel loped steadily down the grassy trail, rutted here and there with the passing of infrequent wagon wheels—but he could not lope fast enough to escape the thing into which Big Medicine’s thirst had betrayed him, for when Destiny chooses to make use of a man, his least act will lead to the task appointed.

As he topped the hill leading out of the coulee, Big Medicine’s pale, round eyes sent a startled glance toward the west. In the little while he had been hidden within the high walls of One Man Coulee a storm had rolled up from the sky line over toward Lonesome Prairie. Already a greenish gloom lay upon the land to the westward, and the hot breeze had died into a sinister silence so great that the cheep of a bird in a bush sent Cheater shying skittishly out of the road.

When Big Medicine’s hand dropped to his horse’s neck the hair crackled as in winter. His own skin prickled. The air seemed soaked with electricity. He sent an uneasy look around