The Flying U Strikes

By B. M. Bower

"The Flying U Strikes" is a 1933 novel by B. M. Bower. Another installment in the Flying U series brings with it more trouble for the gang! After a suspected cattle-rustling incident turns into attempted murder, Chip soon realises that his old nemesis, Big Butch Lewis, has bigger and more sinister plans. An action-packed adventure romp in the American Old West, "The Flying U Strikes" is not to be missed by those with a love of Western fiction and the works of B. M. Bower. 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: 9781473346239

Book preview

The Flying U Strikes

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 - TROUBLE BEGINS

CHAPTER TWO - CHIP TAKES THE HINT

CHAPTER THREE - A MAN-SIZE JOB

CHAPTER FOUR - HORSES FOR SALE

CHAPTER FIVE - A CLUE IN HAND

CHAPTER SIX - FIRST AID FROM POLLY

CHAPTER SEVEN - WHY WAIT FOR PROOF?

CHAPTER EIGHT - BIG BUTCH

CHAPTER NINE - POLLY BUYS IN

CHAPTER TEN - MILT MAKES HIS TALK

CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE FIRST REAL CLUE

CHAPTER TWELVE - BEEF HAULIN’S OVER

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - SEVENTY BELOW ZERO

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - PRISONER’S LOOSE

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE FLYING U TO THE RESCUE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - CHIP STILL WANTS PROOF

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - FIGHT THE DEVIL WITH FIRE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE WIND’S IN THE NORTH

CHAPTER NINETEEN - IT’S LIFE AND DEATH, POLLY

CHAPTER TWENTY - A FINE SCHEME COOKED UP

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - ONE SPY THE LESS

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - MAKE READY FOR WAR

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - CHIP RIDES AGAIN

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - POLLY PLAYS LADY

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - AT BUTCH’S WINDOW

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - POLLY PUTS IT OVER

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - A CHINOOK STRIKES CHIP

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

TROUBLE BEGINS

A raw March wind such as only the high prairies ever know poured like ice water over the bald benchland that forms a part of the Flying U range. It roughened the hair on the two saddle horses; it tossed their manes and it whipped their tails around their hocks as they loped down to the bluff edge where the rough country began.

Chip Bennett, younger of the two riders, broke a silence of half an hour. Those horses will be hugging the brush on a day like this, he said, and drew a hand across his smarting eyes.

That’s right, Weary Davidson agreed. No use combing the benches to-day. Mamma! That wind sure does go through a fellow! What say we swing over to the left here, Chip, and kinda bear off more towards the river? They’re in the breaks, that’s a cinch. We’ve had this wind for four days. I look for ‘em to be watering along Rabbit Creek where there’s lots of shelter.

That’s what I was thinking. Chip hunched his shoulders within his sour-dough coat. We can make it down off that point over there easiest.

With one accord their rein hands twitched to the left and the horses obeyed that slight pressure against the right side of their necks. Instant relief was felt from that biting wind, now pushing hard against their backs instead of flat against their right sides. The tear lines dried upon their cheeks. They let their horses down to a walk, pulled off their gloves and sat on them while they rolled and lighted cigarettes. Neither spoke again. Neither was conscious of their long silences which held a satisfying companionship not to be broken by idle chatter. They were content and that was enough.

Overhead the sky was blue and the sun shone with a spring brightness. After awhile, when they turned off the sloping point of the bench and picked their way down a rocky gulch, a pleasant warmth surrounded them. Here the cold wind could not search them out. Riding ahead, Chip leaned suddenly from the saddle and plucked a crocus from the bank. Straightening again, he took off his hat and tucked the downy stem beneath the hatband in front, and set the hat atilt on his brown head. With his overcoat unbuttoned, Weary rode slack in the saddle, whistling an aimless little tune under his breath.

Down in the sheltered coulee it was spring. A few fat prairie dogs were already bestirring themselves, hunting grass roots or running from mound to mound to gossip with their neighbors. As the two cowboys approached, a shrewish chittering met them, the village inhabitants all standing up on the mounds with their front paws folded like hands. Abruptly they lost courage however and ducked down into their holes, the flirt of their stubby tails as insolent as a thumbed nose.

Out of that coulee and up over another small bench went the riders, the chill wind hounding them over the high ground only to give up the chase when they dipped down into the next hollow. In spite of their seeming casualness, their questing glances went here and there, scanning each wrinkle and hollow that lay exposed to their gaze. The bunch of horses they were hunting might be almost anywhere in this kind of weather.

Weary suddenly pointed a gloved finger. Ain’t that a dead critter down there by that brush patch? Looks like the wolves have been at work down in here.

Not one but six carcasses down there, Chip answered him. We better go take a look. If it’s wolves, they sure have been holding high carnival down there. He reined his horse straight down the slope toward the spot, Weary after him.

It was so steep that when they struck a shale patch both horses slid on their rumps for some distance. But they made the bottom without mishap and rode down to the thicket. A deep bowl of a place it was, the center a jungle of wild berry bushes growing in such luxuriance as would indicate a spring close by. On the sunny side of the thicket lay a group of carcasses, evidently some time dead.

The two rode up and stopped, staring about them. Mamma! gasped Weary. Looks like here’s where the wolves have held an old-timer’s reunion. Six beef critters pulled down all in one bunch! Now what d’you know about that?

Not half as much as I’m going to know before I’m through, Chip retorted. He stepped off his horse and walked over to the first carcass. With his hands on his hips he stared down at the unlovely heap for a minute, then walked on to the next and the next. He turned back and looked at Weary, standing just behind him.

Shot in the head. The whole damn bunch, Weary answered the look. You saw that, didn’t yuh?

I’d tell a man I saw it. Take hold, here. Let’s see the brand—if they left one.

They caught hold of the mauled and shriveled hide where the hind quarters should have been and flipped it over. The brand was the Flying U, and as they went from one to the other, they verified the brand on each. Six Flying U beeves, still showing the bullet holes in their heads where they had been shot down. And while the fore quarters had been half devoured by wolves, the hind quarters had been skinned out of the hides and carried off.

Beef rustlers, said Weary, as they returned to their horses. I sure would like to know who pulled that stunt. Looks to me like they either want to advertise the fact they’re after the Flying U or else they don’t give a darn. Never even took the trouble to cut out the brands, you notice. He looked at young Bennett. That mean anything to you, Chip?

It certainly does. After that trouble last summer with Big Butch’s outfit, it means they’re making war medicine again. I was wondering what made ‘em so damn peaceable; after losing four men in that fight we had, it looked to me like they’d take another whack at the Flying U, just to break even. Young Bennett frowned down at the nearest heap of bones and hide. He did not add what loomed blackest in his thoughts: that he himself, with a personal quarrel to settle with one of Big Butch’s men, had really brought the Flying U into the trouble with Butch Lewis’ outfit.

He hated to admit it, even to himself, but it was true. He had been looking for his brother, up in this country along the Missouri, and had run into