the scenery seem somehow to favor the intimate revelation of character
that the story displays. There is no intervention of cities, crops,
fashions, or conventions between the different members of the character
group or between the group as a whole and the reader. All is bare like a
white mountain peak. Notice also how the background of a common peril
draws the characters together and brings out at last the best in each.

_Plot_. The story sets forth and interprets a dramatic situation. The
plot is staged so as to answer the question, "Do not the people whom
society regards as outcasts have yet some redeeming virtue?" Notice
especially how a sense of common fellowship is developed in these
outcasts. First, they are subjected to a common humiliation in being
driven from Poker Flat by persons whom the outcasts consider no whit
better than themselves. Next, they are exposed to a common danger, a
danger that leads the stronger to care instinctively for the weaker, and
the weaker to recognize that it is nobler to give than to receive. At
last, in the unexpected entrance of the innocent Tom Simson and the
guileless Piney Woods, the outcasts find a common challenge to the
native goodness that had long lain dormant within them. Innocence and
guilelessness may be laughed at, as they are here, but their appeal is
often stronger than the appeal of disciplined virtue or of
self-conscious superiority. When Bret Harte was charged with confusing
the boundary lines of vice and virtue he replied that his plots
"conformed to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the
parable of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan."

_Characters_. Oakhurst, who is always called "Mr." Oakhurst, is of
course the dominant character. The story begins with him and ends with
him. He is "the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker
Flat,"--strong while there was anything to be done, weak even to suicide
when he had only to wait for the inevitable end. He was a brave,
desperate, solitary man, whose thought and speech and action, however,
were always those of the professional gambler. Bret Harte, who has put
him into several stories, says of him in another place: "Go where he
would and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand." The
admiration that we yield to such a man, though it is only a qualified
admiration, is doubtless the admiration of power which, we cannot help
thinking, might be used beneficently if it could only