e melancholy experiences so significant of the dying
border, I had the comfort of my undaunted wife whose happy spirit
refused to be clouded by what she recognized as merely the natural decay
of the preceding generation. Her mind was set on the future, our future.
She refused to yield her youthful right to happiness, and under the
influence of her serene philosophy I went back to my writing, or at
least to the serious consideration of another mountain theme, which was
taking shape in my brain.

With a mere love-story I had never been content. For me a sociological
background was necessary in order to make fiction worth while, and I was
minded to base my next novel on a study of the "war" which had just
taken place, at Cripple Creek, between the Free Miner, the Union Miner
and the Operator or Capitalist.

The suggestion for this theme had come to me during a call on some
friends in New York City, where I had been amused and somewhat
embarrassed, by the ecstatic and outspoken admiration of a boy of
fourteen, who was (as his mother put it) "quite crazy over miners,
Indians and cowboys. His dream is to go West and illustrate your books,"
she had said to me.

This lad's enthusiasm for the West and his ambition to be an illustrator
of western stories had started me on a tale in which a fine but rather
spoiled New York girl was to be carried to Colorado by the enthusiasm of
her youthful brother, and there plunged (against her will) into the
warfare of mountaineers and miners, a turbulence which her beloved
brother would insist on sharing. Such a girl might conceivably find
herself in the storm center of a contest such as that which had taken
place on Bull Hill in the late nineties.

I called this study _Hesper, or the Cowboy Patrol_ for the reason that
in "the Cripple Creek War," cattlemen had acted as outposts for the
union miners, and in this fact I perceived something picturesque and new
and telling, something which would give me just the imaginative impulse
I required.

Some of my friendly critics were still occasionally writing to me to
ask, "Why don't you give us more _Main Traveled Roads_ stories," and it
was not easy to make plain to them that I had moved away from that mood,
and that my life and farm life had both greatly altered in thirty years.
To repeat the tone of that book would have been false not only to my
art, but to the country as well.

Furthermore, I had done that work. I had put together in _Main T