A Texas Ranger

(1910)

Foreword to Ye Gentle Reader:

Within the memory of those of us still on the sunny side of forty the more remote West has passed from rollicking boyhood to its responsible majority. The frontier has gone to join the good Indian. In place of the ranger who patrolled the border for "bad men" has come the forest ranger, type of the forward lapping tide of civilization. The place where I write this-- Tucson, Arizona-- is now essentially more civilized than New York. Only at the moving picture shows can the old West, melodramatically overpainted, be shown to the manicured sons and daughters of those, still living, who brought law and order to the mesquite.

As Arthur Chapman, the Western poet, has written:

No loopholes now are framing

Lean faces, grim and brown;

No more keen eyes are aiming

To bring the redskin down.

The plough team's trappings jingle

Across the furrowed field,

And sounds domestic mingle

Where valor hung its shield.

But every wind careering

Seems here to breathe a song--

A song of brave frontiering--

A saga of the strong.