The Case of Summerfield

By William Henry Rhodes



With an Introduction by Geraldine Bonner




The Introduction



The greatest master of the short story our country has known found his
inspiration and produced his best work in California. It is now nearly
forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of
successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the trail
blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds,
realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material
much that was good has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed
some; weeklies, that lived for a brief day, carried others to the grave
with them. Now and then chance or design interposed, and some fragment
of value was not allowed to perish. It is matter for congratulation that
the story in this volume was one of those saved from oblivion.

In 1871 a San Francisco paper published a tale entitled The Case of
Summerfield. The author concealed himself under the name of "Caxton," a
pseudonym unknown at the time. The story made an immediate impression,