for the old man that his proposal was adopted with a cheer for the
advocate of law and order, and the culprit taken to the jail at
Columbia.

Chaffee's partner, Chamberlain, seems to have had no part in this
affair; but the two were united by a love like that of his partner for
Tennessee. And long after the Second Garrote had become but a memory,
the two octogenarians lived on in their little cabin, Chaffee seeking
with primitive pick, shovel, and pan the more and more elusive gold, and
Chamberlain contributing to the common purse by cultivating a small
"ranch," the best crop of which was the campers who came to chat of
bygone days with "the original of Tennessee's Partner." At last, in
1903, their partnership of fifty-four years was ended by the death of
Chaffee. Within eight weeks he was followed by Chamberlain. Their last
days were made easy by the bounty of Professor W. E. Magee, of the State
University, to whom I am indebted for the authority for some of these
statements, - Chamberlain's journal.

From this simple material the imagination of Bret Harte spun the
characters, incidents, and motives that his genius wove into an
exquisite fabric, an idyl of blind, unreasoning love of man for man. He
was not writing history; and the complaint of those who were part of the
life he depicted, that he misstated the facts, rests on the same failure
to appreciate his purpose and method that leads Eastern and English
critics to consider his realism reality and to mistake his
verisimilitude for the truth itself. The fact is that Bret Harte was a
consummate literary artist, who used facts with all an artist's freedom.
His genius "imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life,"
however, many an actual incident that otherwise would lie buried 'neath
the poppy that the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth.