ick, he seemed more of a
character than a type. The sun had browned his face till it was almost
swarthy. His eyes were a dark brown, and his forehead was the forehead
of the intellectual, wide and high, with a certain unmistakable lift
about it that argued education, not only of himself, but of his people
before him. The impression conveyed by his mouth and chin was that of
a delicate and highly sensitive nature, the lips thin and loosely shut
together, the chin small and rather receding. One guessed that Presley's
refinement had been gained only by a certain loss of strength. One
expected to find him nervous, introspective, to discover that his mental
life was not at all the result of impressions and sensations that came
to him from without, but rather of thoughts and reflections germinating
from within. Though morbidly sensitive to changes in his physical
surroundings, he would be slow to act upon such sensations, would not
prove impulsive, not because he was sluggish, but because he was merely
irresolute. It could be foreseen that morally he was of that sort
who avoid evil through good taste, lack of decision, and want of
opportunity. His temperament was that of the poet; when he told himself
he had been thinking, he deceived himself. He had, on such occasions,
been only brooding.

Some eighteen months before this time, he had been threatened with
consumption, and, taking advantage of a standing invitation on the part
of Magnus Derrick, had come to stay in the dry, even climate of the San
Joaquin for an indefinite length of time. He was thirty years old,
and had graduated and post-graduated with high honours from an
Eastern college, where he had devoted himself to a passionate study of
literature, and, more especially, of poetry.

It was his insatiable ambition to write verse. But up to this time,
his work had been fugitive, ephemeral, a note here and there, heard,
appreciated, and forgotten. He was in search of a subject; something
magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous theme,
heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of
hexameters.

But whatever he wrote, and in whatever fashion, Presley was determined
that his poem should be of the West, that world's frontier of Romance,
where a new race, a new people--hardy, brave, and passionate--were
building an empire; where the tumultuous life ran like fire from dawn
to dark, and from dark to dawn again, primitive, brutal,