B M Bower

Chip, of the Flying U by B. M. Bower All of the boys at the Flying U grumbled -- among themselves -- when they heard that the Old Man's sister was coming to spend the summer. They didn't want a woman at the ranch, and certainly not one who had just received a medical degree But if they'd had an inkling of what was really going to happen, they would have done more than grumble...

"... the mind fed too long upon monotony succumbs to the insidious mental ailment which the West calls 'cabin fever.' ... Bud Moore, ex-cow-puncher and now owner of an auto stage that did not run in the winter, was touched with cabin fever and did not know what ailed him. His stage line ran from San Jose, California, up through Los Gatos and over the Bear Creek road across the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains and down to the State Park, which is locally called Big Basin, the first state park of California. For something over fifty miles of wonderful scenic travel he charged six dollars, and usually his big car was loaded to the running boards. Bud was a good driver, and he had a friendly pair of eyes--dark blue and with a humorous little twinkle deep down in them somewhere--and a human little smiley quirk at the corners of his lips. He did not know it, but these things helped to fill his car. ... "If you would test the soul of a friend, take him into the wilderness and rub elbows with him for five months One of three things will surely happen: You will hate each other afterward with that enlightened hatred which is seasoned with contempt; you will emerge with the contempt tinged with a pitying toleration, or you will be close, unquestioning friends to the last six feet of earth--and beyond. All these things will cabin fever do, and more. It has committed murder, many's the time. It has driven men crazy. It has warped and distorted character out of all semblance to its former self. It has sweetened love and killed love. There is an antidote--but I am going to let you find the antidote somewhere in the story."

Chip, of the Flying U Set on a ranch in Montana, the novel introduces the "Happy Family", the bunkhouse gang including Chip as a typical woman-shy cowboy. The beautiful young doctor Della, is a distraction for poor Chip and the other cowboys. Chip of the Flying U was a great success that led to several movie versions, one of them casting Hoot Gibson as Chip.

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Excerpt: A man is very much like a horse. Once thoroughly frightened by something he meets on the road he will invariably shy at the same place afterwards until a wisely firm master leads him perforce to the spot and proves beyond all doubt that the danger is of his own imagining; after which he will throw up his head and deny that he ever was afraid and be quite amusingly sincere in the denial. Bertha Muzzy Sinclair or Sinclair-Cowan, nee Muzzy (November 15, 1871 - July 23, 1940), best known by her pseudonym B. M. Bower, was an American author who wrote novels, fictional short stories, and screenplays about the American Old West. Her works, featuring cowboys and cows of the Flying U Ranch in Montana, reflected ""an interest in ranch life, the use of working cowboys as main characters (even in romantic plots), a sense of western geography as simultaneously harsh and grand, and a good deal of factual attention to such matters as cattle branding and bronc busting.""

Daffodils were selling at two bits a dozen in the flower stand beside the New Era Drug Store. Therefore Peter Stevenson knew that winter was over, and that the weather would probably "settle." There would be the spring fogs, of course--and fog did not agree with Helen May since that last spell of grippe. Peter decided that he would stop and see the doctor again, and ask him what he thought of a bungalow out against the hills behind Hollywood; something cheap, of course--and within the five-cent limit on the street cars; something with a sleeping porch that opened upon a pleasanter outlook than your neighbor's back yard