stories smack of the soil; his characters--especially in "John Brent,"
where his own ride across the continent is dramatized--are as fresh and
as true as only a true artist could make them. Take, for instance, the
"Pike," the border-ruffian transplanted to a California "ranch,"--not a
ruffian, as he says, but a barbarian.

"America is manufacturing several new types of men. The Pike is one of
the newest. He is a bastard pioneer. With one hand he clutches the
pioneer vices; with the other he beckons forward the vices of
civilization. It is hard to understand how a man can have so little
virtue in so long a body, unless the shakes are foes to virtue in the
soul, as they are to beauty in the face.

"He is a terrible shock, this unlucky Pike, to the hope that the new
race on the new continent is to be a handsome race. I lose that faith,
which the people about me now have nourished, when I recall the Pike. He
is hung together, not put together. He inserts his lank fathom of a man
into a suit of molasses-colored homespun. Frowzy and husky is the hair
Nature crowns him with; frowzy and stubby the beard. He shambles in his
walk. He drawls in his talk. He drinks whiskey by the tank. His oaths
are to his words as Falstaff's sack to his bread. I have seen Maltese
beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars, New-York aldermen, Digger
Indians; the foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever seen are
thorough-bred Pikes."

This is not complimentary, but any one who has seen the creature knows
that it is a portrait done by a first-rate artist.

Take, again, that other vulgarer ruffian, "Jim Robinson," "a little man,
stockish, oily, and red in the face, a jaunty fellow, too, with a