PREFACE.
_In the Boys' Golden West Series I have done my best to present to its readers the West that I knew as a boy._ _Frontier days were made up of many different kinds of humans.

There were men who were muddy-bellied coyotes, so low that they hugged the ground like a snake.

There were girls whose cheeks were so toughened by shame as to be hardly knowable from squaws.

There were stoic Indians with red-raw, liquor-dilated eyes, peaceable and just when sober, boastful and intolerant when drunk.

And then there were those White Men, those moulders, those makers of the great, big open-hearted West, that had not yet been denatured by nesters and wire fences, men to whom a Colt gun was the court of last appeal and who did not carry a warrant in their pockets until it was worn out, men who faced staggering odds and danger single-handed and alone, men who created and worked out and made an Ideal Civilization,--a country where doors were left unlocked at night and the windows of the mind were always open,--men who were always kind to the weak and unprotected, even if they did have hoofs and horns, men like William B.( Bat) Masterson and Wyatt Earp.