I flashed out a trifle called Wedded but Not Won; or, Did She Care? in which—I admit it—I settled a few long-standing scores with Dora. She had a simpering admirer named Waddy Peacock, a man, by my reckoning, even more boring than myself, though I suppose it’s just possible that Dora’s reckoning was more favorable than my own. This speculation gave verve to my pen, and in the tale that resulted Dora was given the energies, as well as the inclinations, of a Lola Montez.

Two days and I was finished; but the Texas Moon was still only inching its way past the Carolinas. My thoughts kept turning to Chittim. I felt I owed him something, but how to pay it? The man was dead. I had left money to his widow, but still I had a sense of the debt.

Had anyone ever been kinder to me than Chittim? I couldn’t recall that they had. Being far from home, hearth, and newsstands, sentiment made easy prey of me. I had scarcely ended Wedded but Not Won when I began The Butler’s Sorrow; or, Chittim’s Trek.

It was the story of a loyal butler who crossed the Sonoran desert on foot in order to deliver an important document to his beloved young mistress, a rich girl soon to be richer, but presently taking the waters at a spa in California. The document informed her that she had just inherited a vast ancestral estate.

The loyal butler, knowing that he could aspire to nothing more, hoped that at least the young lady would take him with her to her new home and keep him as her butler forever, but the heartless vixen, annoyed by his shabby appearance—there had been the usual scrapes with Apaches and Gila monsters—sacked him on the spot. The poor man’s despair was such that he lost his way, drifted south, and was eventually eaten by cannibals in Ecuador.

We stopped in New Orleans for a day and I posted the two stories, little suspecting that I had just mailed off the most popular dime novel ever written: The Butler’s Sorrow.

Wedded but Not Won may have struck a chord with a few embittered husbands, but The Butler’s Sorrow circled the entire globe in a matter of months. It became known as the book read by four Presidents; and besides the four Presidents, the young Czar read it, the old Queen read it—virtually everyone who could read in the whole world read it. It even outsold Ragged Dick, and I’ve heard it reported—though this may be spoofing—that when Livingstone was finally found, he inquired of Stanley if he had thought to bring a copy with him.

I suppose it merely means that more people than one might think secretly harbor the feeling of having mistreated the butler.

15.