PREFACE


_In the Boys' Golden West Series I have done my best to present to its
readers the West that I knew as a boy._

_Frontier days were made up of many different kinds of humans. There
were men who were muddy-bellied coyotes, so low that they hugged the
ground like a snake. There were girls whose cheeks were so toughened by
shame as to be hardly knowable from squaws. There were stoic Indians
with red-raw, liquor-dilated eyes, peaceable and just when sober,
boastful and intolerant when drunk. And then there were those White Men,
those moulders, those makers of the great, big open-hearted West, that
had not yet been denatured by nesters and wire fences, men to whom a
Colt gun was the court of last appeal and who did not carry a warrant in
their pockets until it was worn out, men who faced staggering odds and
danger single-handed and alone, men who created and worked out and made
an Ideal Civilization,--a country where doors were left unlocked at
night and the windows of the mind were always open,--men who were
always kind to the weak and unprotected, even if they did have hoofs and
horns, men like William B. (Bat) Masterson and Wyatt Earp. They and
their kind made the frontier, that Great West which we can now look back
upon as the most romantic era of our American History._

_I love it; I love all that was ever connected with it; and to all those
who are in sympathy with my crude efforts to set forth what little I