Chapter 1
Peaceful Hart RanchIt 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
