intelligence for something. For contrast, take the immortal work
entitled Deadwood Dick of Deadwood; or, The Picked Party; by Edward
L. Wheeler, a copy of which has just come to my attention again
nearly thirty years after the time of my first reading of it.
Consider the opening paragraph:

The sun was just kissing the mountain tops that frowned down
upon Billy-Goat Gulch, and in the aforesaid mighty seam in the
face of mighty Nature the shadows of a Warm June night were
gathering rapidly.

The birds had mostly hushed their songs and flown to their
nests in the dismal lonely pines, and only the tuneful twang
of a well-played banjo aroused the brooding quiet, save it be
the shrill, croaking screams of a crow, perched upon the top
of a dead pine, which rose from the nearly perpendicular
mountain side that retreated in the ascending from the gulch
bottom.

That, as I recall, was a powerfully long bit of description for a
nickul librury, and having got it out of his system Mr. Wheeler
wasted no more valuable space on the scenery. From this point
on he gave you action--action with reason behind it and logic to
it and the guaranty of a proper climax and a satisfactory conclusion
to follow. Deadwood Dick marched many a flower-strewn mile through
my young life, but to the best of my recollection he never shut
off anybody's sublunary prospects. If a party deserved killing
Deadwood just naturally up and killed him, and the historian told
about it in graphic yet straightforward terms of speech; and that
was all there was to it, and that was all there should have been