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Preface It requires some assurance to step out of the conventional in story writing. Especially does it require courage on the part of one whose ideals of what a story should be are far beyond what his productions can ever attain. But the physician, who gets closer to things human than others do, may perhaps be forgiven unorthodox subjects and methods of expression. Surely, also, he will be excused for drawing upon his own field of work for his subject matter. I have this to say of my material characters—they are all taken from life. Even Tommy the Outcast was the genuine article of hero. He crept into my life through a hole in my cellar window one furiously stormy night. He went out of it via a dose of poison, meant for his hereditary foes—the rats. Talk? No, he did not talk, but I’m sure he used to think—hard and often—and I fancy no one will upbraid me for trying in my feeble way to read his mind and act as his proxy in the expression of the things he thought, and in telling the sad story of his life. The mythical red hero and the golden haired goddess of the Yosemite are the more beautiful for being unsubstantial. The pretty little legend on which their story was founded was anonymously published nearly fifty years ago in some eastern magazine, the name of which escapes me. I found it among the rubbish of my grandfather’s attic, when a lad. It seems that the legend was originally obtained from an old Indian warrior, who related it essentially as it had descended to him through many generations of ancestors. Like many other beautiful traditions of our American aborigines, the legend of the Yosemite has been buried in the mists of obscurity and the dust of forgetfulness. I trust that my amplified version is not unworthy of the original. It will at least serve to resurrect from the Valley of the Lost a bit of beautiful sentiment that deserved a better fate. I hope this may not be its second burial, and that the paleface may find something sweetly sentimental in the mythical tale of Tis-sa-ack and Tu-toch-a-nu-lah. For the benefit of those who may chance to discern in the hero of the Yosemite a slight tinge of Frederick Cozzens’ ancient legend of the Palisades, I freely acknowledge the debt I owe to the “Big Pappoose.” Most of the incidents related in the various stories in this volume are authentic. Those upon which the story of the Dead Ideal is founded come back to me vividly from my student days with all the halo of bright romance which they then possessed. To this day I have longed to know who and what the beautiful subject was. He who could not weave romance about that fair unfortunate must needs be the victim of that worst of fates—soul death. Nearly all the characters in Poker Jim are real. There was no dearth of material from which to select subjects. I was born amid the California Sierras in the placer mines of Tuolumne. Some of the years of my early childhood were spent in the mountains of Calaveras. Here in the midst of a rude mining population were to be found interesting characters a plenty.