en Indians were not mere untidy neighbors to
be gossiped with and fed, but enemies to be fought, upon occasion.

They felt that fate had cheated them--did those five sons; for they had
been born a few years too late for the fun. Not one of them would ever
have earned the title of "Peaceful," as had his father. Nature had
played a joke upon old Peaceful Hart; for he, the mildest-mannered
man who ever helped to tame the West when it really needed taming, had
somehow fathered five riotous young males to whom fight meant fun--and
the fiercer, the funnier.

He used to suck at his old, straight-stemmed pipe and regard them with a
bewildered curiosity sometimes; but he never tried to put his puzzlement
into speech. The nearest he ever came to elucidation, perhaps, was when
he turned from them and let his pale-blue eyes dwell speculatively
upon the face of his wife, Phoebe. Clearly he considered that she was
responsible for their dispositions.

The house stood cuddled against a rocky bluff so high it dwarfed the
whole ranch to pygmy size when one gazed down from the rim, and so steep
that one wondered how the huge, gray bowlders managed to perch upon
its side instead of rolling down and crushing the buildings to dust and
fragments. Strangers used to keep a wary eye upon that bluff, as if
they never felt quite safe from its menace. Coyotes skulked there, and
tarantulas and "bobcats" and snakes. Once an outlaw hid there for days,
within sight and hearing of the house, and stole bread from Phoebe's
pantry at night--but that is a story in itself.

A great spring gurgled out from under a huge bowlder just behind the
house, and over it Peaceful had built a stone milk house, where Phoebe
spent long hours in cool retirement on churning day, and where one went
to beg good things to eat and to drink. There was fruit cake always
hidden away in stone jars, and cheese, and buttermilk, and cream.

Peaceful Hart must have had a streak of poetry somewhere hidden away in
his silent soul. He built a pond against the bluff; hollowed it out from
the sand he had once washed for traces of gold, and let the big spring
fill it full and seek an outlet at the far end, where it slid away under
a little stone bridge. He planted the pond with rainbow trout, and on
the margin a rampart of Lombardy poplars, which grew and grew until they
threatened to reach up and tear ragged holes in the drifting clouds.
Their slender shadows lay, like gigantic fingers,