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.

A few—alas! how very few—of those rugged, homely, adventurous spirits whom I knew in my boyhood are still living. I have within a few months past been privileged to clasp their dear old hands and listen to their oft told tales of the romantic early days of my native state.

I recently spent several hours at the house of a friend in San Francisco, watching the play of emotion on the wrinkled face of an aged Argonaut as he listened while our host and I were discussing the various characters of the story of Poker Jim. Needless to say, old time memories were revived in the mind of the poor old man. I shall never forget his tear dimmed eyes as he looked up at me and said, reverently, “Doc, I knowed ’em well—your pa, an’ your gran’pa, an’ Poker Jim an’ all on ’em.”

As I sit here in my quiet study harking back to my last trip to the mountains and valleys of Tuolumne and Calaveras, there appears before my mind’s eye a picture of the old golden days brought down to the year 1900. In the foreground, at the door of his rude log cabin, stands that dear old octogenarian, “French Tom” of Tuolumne, gazing toward the green verdured hills on the opposite bank of the river, just where Moccasin Creek debouches into the swift running crystal waters of the Tuolumne. He shades his poor old eyes with his hand, and looks long and earnestly at a man who is slowly passing along the old Yosemite trail. When he reached the summit of the hill the man turned and stood limned against the brilliant morning sky, a ghost of happier days.

Long past three score and ten, bent and withered, crippled with the “rheumatiz,” with pick on shoulder and pan and grub wallet by his side, “Dixie” was still pursuing the Golden Fleece. On the morrow—Sunday—Tom and Dixie would meet and talk it all over, and tell each other the same old wonderful lies of enormous golden finds, and “saltings” of the tenderfoot, that they had been exchanging since ’49.

“Good luck, old pard!” and “The same to you!” were wafted gently down the beautiful valley to the heart-full wanderer who had come home after so many years.

Dixie vanished over the brow of the hill, and Tom dove into his tumble-down shack to prepare the breakfast of fish fresh from the river to which he had invited his doctor friend.

And the picture that my memory paints is no longer possible, for dear old Dixie has gone over the Divide, to dig for gold at the foot of eternal rainbows in the placers of the Great Beyond. And I am glad that I went in quest of childhood’s memories while it was yet time.

Out of the Valley of Shadows, Mnemosyne—most puissant goddess of them all—leads forth a procession of misty familiar shapes that bring the warmth of affection to my heart and the smile of welcome to my lips. And they smile back at me in that quiet way which friendly shadows have.

As the vague and unsubstantial forms flit silently past me from out the ivory portals where Memory’s golden scepter holds undisputed sway, I recognize a host of my boyhood’s friends; “Poker Jim”, “Boston”, “Toppy,” “Big” Brown, “Yankee”, “Jersey”, “Link” Spears, Tom Chandler, Dave Smuggins, Ike Dessler, Bill Loveless, and many more of the bronzed, deep-chested, red-shirted, hair-triggered Knights of the Golden Fleece smile back at me from the ghostly file.

Last, but not least, comes my boyhood’s hero, that Turpin of the border, “Three Fingered Jack” of Calaveras, who has been served up to us in so many and various forms of literary hash that I shall one day write his true history as a matter of pious duty.

G. Frank Lydston.