can easily understand how he would come across the scene of the
encounter in one of his tours into western Arizona. My interest in the
affair is impersonal, but none the less keen. Though I did not know
young Karslake, I knew his stuff--as everybody still does, when you come
to that. For the matter of that, the mere mention of his pen-name,
"Anson Qualtraugh," recalls at once to thousands of the readers of a
certain world-famous monthly magazine of New York articles and stories
he wrote for it while he was alive; as, for instance, his admirable
descriptive work called "Traces of the Aztecs on the Mogolon Mesa," in
the October number of 1890. Also, in the January issue of 1892 there are
two specimens of his work, one signed Anson Qualtraugh and the other
Justin Blisset. Why he should have used the Blisset signature I do not
know. It occurs only this once in all his writings. In this case it is
signed to a very indifferent New Year's story. The Qualtraugh "stuff" of
the same number is, so the editor writes to me, a much shortened
transcript of a monograph on "Primitive Methods of Moki Irrigation,"
which are now in the archives of the Smithsonian. The admirable novel,
"The Peculiar Treasure of Kings," is of course well known. Karslake
wrote it in 1888-89, and the controversy that arose about the incident
of the third chapter is still--sporadically and intermittently--continued.

The manuscript that follows now appears, of course, for the first time
in print, and I acknowledge herewith my obligations to Karslake's
father, Mr. Patterson Karslake, for permission to publish.

I have set the account down word for word, with all the hiatuses and
breaks that by nature of the extraordinary circumstances under which it
was written were bound to appear in it. I have allowed it to end
precisely as Karslake was forced to end it, in the middle of a sentence.
God knows the real end is plain enough and was not far off when the poor