hips made me more tolerant of the gun than some others
were. Goodwin and a gun sent me searching mentally over the West from
Colorado to the Coast, and through all occupations from bandit to
fighting parson; and then my potential gallery, quite apart from
any conscious effort of my own, divided itself into two kinds of
gunpackers: the authorized and the others. I concluded that there
would be less trouble, less "lost motion"--that was a phrase learned,
and an idea applied in the old-fashioned composing-room--less lost
motion, in portraying a lawful gun toter than in justifying an
outlaw; and the Goodwin part was therefore to be either a soldier or
a sheriff. I have said that he was thin, graceful--and he was, but he
wasn't particularly erect. He was especially free from any suggestion
of "setting-up:" sheriff was the way of least resistance.

My hero was a sheriff. You see how that clears the atmosphere. When
you must, or may, write for a "star," it is a big start to have the
character agreeably and definitely chosen.

There must be love interest, of course.

A sheriff would presumably be a bit of the rough diamond; _contrast_
wherein "lieth love's delight" prompted a girl apparently of a finer
strain than himself; and _conflict_ necessitated a rival. The girl
should be delicate and educated, the _rival_ should be attractive but
unworthy; and to make him doubly opposed to Goodwin I decided to
have him an outlaw--someone whom it would be the sheriff's duty and
business--_business_ used in the stage sense--to arrest.

Four or five years before the Goodwin contract, I had been one of the
_Post-Dispatch_ reporters on the "Jim Cummings" express robbery.
That celebrated and picturesque case was of a man who presented to
an express messenger at the side door of his express car, just as the
train was pulling from the St. Louis station, a forged order to carry
the bearer, dead-head, to a certain distant point on the run. The
messenger helped the dead-head into his car, and chummed with him,
until about an hour later, when, as he was on his knees arranging
some of his cargo, he found a pistol muzzle against his cheek, and his
smiling visitor prepared to bind and gag him. Having done this, the
stranger packed one hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a valise;
and dropped off into the dark, when the train made its accustomed
stop at a water-tank. The whole enterprise was so gentle, that the
messenger was arrested and held a