I doubt anyone has caught a worse case of dime-novel mania than I had. First I read them, then I had to try writing them. The fever they aroused in me was a kind of mental malaria. Even now, with all the characters in the story long since dead—unless Bloody Feathers is still alive, up there in his black country by the river of Souls, or Katie Garza still fomenting revolution in Patagonia or somewhere—occasionally the old fever flares up again.

It seems astonishing, thinking of it now, that a little trifling half-dimer such as Hurricane Nell could change a man’s life so. Yet it did. Without it I would never have known Billy Bone, or Will Isinglass and his tall killer, Mesty-Woolah. I would never have set foot in Greasy Corners or made the acquaintance of Des Montaignes and Tully Roebuck. I would not have picked prairie flowers with the brilliant Lady Snow, or ridden with the fearless Katerina Garza. Someone else, not I, would have been left to heap the sod over Joe Lovelady, and over Simp Dixon and Happy Jack Marco and most of the other sweethearts who died in the Whiskey Glass war.

But Hurricane Nell led to Mustang Merle’s Mandate, and Mustang Merle to The Kansas Kitten. Within a year I had written Sandycraw, Man of Grit, a character so popular that someone, somewhere, is probably still churning out his adventures. On days when I wasn’t in the mood for the Man of Grit, I wrote about Orson Oxx, Man of Iron, a somewhat more sensitive specimen, and no less popular.

I had been a Philadelphia gentleman, reasonably attentive to the duties of my station; but in a matter of months I became wholly distracted, descending each morning into the sea of my daughters with prairies in my head.

Our butler was required to present himself at the local cigar stand at 8 A.M. precisely; by eight-fifteen I expected him to race in the door with whatever new adventures were available. A day that brought no Mustang Merle or Saul Sabberday (The Idiot Spy) was a day of emptiness and gloom, followed, invariably and rapidly, by sodden, unhappy inebriation. Why wouldn’t the damn writers write faster? Had they no inkling of the painful needs they aroused?

“What’s a butler?” Billy Bone wanted to know. His folks had brought him West to Trinidad, Colorado, as a six-weeks-old baby, and his only notion of a city was some little place such as Santa Fe. Joe Lovelady had grown up in Texas and was no better informed.

I tried to explain about butlers—of course I was still miserable about what happened to ours. But Billy had a fine curiosity. He’d ask a hundred questions, as any kid will.

“Sounds like a slave that’s not a nigger,” he concluded. “If I was ever a butler I’d probably shoot the whole family the first day.”