Adventures of Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince, from Youth to his Death by
Assassination. Deeds of Daring, Adventure and Thrilling Incidents in the
Life of J. B. Hickok, known to the World as Wild Bill.

These titles and many another did I read, and reading them my mind slid
back along a groove in my brain to a certain stable loft in a certain
Kentucky town, and I said to myself that if I had a boy--say, about
twelve or fourteen years old--I would go to this auction and bid in
these books and I would back them up and reenforce them with some of
the best of the collected works of Nick Carter and Cap Collier and
Nick Carter, Jr., and Frank Reade, and I would buy, if I could find it
anywhere, a certain paper-backed volume dealing with the life of the
James boys--not Henry and William, but Jesse and Frank--which I read
ever so long ago; and I would confer the whole lot of them upon that
offspring of mine and I would say to him:

"Here, my son, is something for you; a rare and precious gift. Read
these volumes openly. Never mind the crude style in which most of them
are written. It can't be any worse than the stilted and artificial style
in which your school reader is written; and, anyhow, if you are ever
going to be a writer, style is a thing which you laboriously must learn,
and then having acquired added wisdom you will forget part of it and
chuck the rest of it out of the window and acquire a style of your own,
which merely is another way of saying that if you have good taste to
start with you will have what is called style in writing, and if you
haven't that sense of good taste you won't have a style and nothing can
give it to you.

"Read them for the thrills that are in them. Read them, remembering
that if this country had not had a pioneer breed of Buckskin Sams and
Deadwood Dicks we should have had no native school of dime novelists.
Read them for their brisk and stirring movement; for the spirit of
outdoor adventure and life which crowds them; for their swift but
logical processions of sequences; for the phases of pioneer Americanism
they rawly but graphically portray, and for their moral values. Read
them along with your Coopers and your Ivanhoe and your Mayne Reids. Read
them through, and perhaps some day, if fortune is kinder to you than
ever it was to your father, with a background behind you and a vision
before you, you may be inspired to sit down and write a dime novel of
your own almost good enough to be wor