I soon gave up the club and the cronies, family life, parlormaids, and all the rest, to devote myself to art. It seemed to me I had real experience to draw on at last, and I set about to turn the rough scribblings I had done on the llano into books which I felt sure would far eclipse the popularity of Sandycraw, Orson Oxx, or even The Butler’s Sorrow. How could material so colorful and so rich possibly miss? True, Billy the Kid had failed, but I dismissed that as a fluke.

So I all but nailed myself into my study and raced through a dozen books, confident that at last I had graduated from mere tales into literary works to be proud of. I wrote Skunkwater Flats; or, The Desperate Battle. I polished up Mutes of the Mesa, and Sister of the Sangre as well. I rewrote the ending of Black Beans to give it more human depth.

Then I applied myself to all of those vivid characters I had met on the plains. I wrote The Missed Bottle; or, Hill Coe’s Disgrace. I wrote Emperor of the Llano about Will Isinglass; The Ophelia of the Prairies about Cecily, even generously excusing her behavior on grounds of madness.

The Girl Who Robbed the Governor; or, Jornado del Muerto was the first of my books about Katie; later I penned The Flame of the Cantinas; or, The Pecos Beauty. Mesty-Woolah lived again in The Negro of the Nile; or, Son of the Mahdi; and I wept my way through Joe Lovelady; or, The Cowboy’s Lament. To this day I only have to remember that kind, lonely man to feel decidedly weepy.

The brute fact is, all the books failed. I had once stood at the head of the Beadle and Adams list; I wrote The Butler’s Sorrow, the most popular dime novel of all time; but publishers are not long on sentiment, and after eight or nine failures it became clear they had ceased to look with enthusiasm on the parcels I mailed them so regularly.

Finally they sent one back—it was The Trapper’s Mistress; or, The Yellow Witch—with a chilly note from some young editor I had never heard of. “Dear Mr. Sippy”—it read—“This Wild West stuff won’t do. Our readers won’t tolerate cowboys now; what we want are detectives, Pinkertons especially. If you care to send us a few Pinkerton yarns we’ll give them prompt consideration. We all hope to see you return to the form you had when you wrote the great Sandycraw stories.”

I don’t think of myself as having a particularly frail spirit, but the fact is I never recovered from that letter: the sting was too sharp. No one wanted my new knowledge, my human depth—they only wanted my old, silly heroes—or, failing that, Pinkertons.

I never wrote again. As abruptly as it started, it stopped.