Project Gutenberg's The Case of Summerfield, by William Henry Rhodes

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Title: The Case of Summerfield

Author: William Henry Rhodes

Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5191]
Posting Date: March 25, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CASE OF SUMMERFIELD ***

Produced by David A. Schwan

THE CASE OF SUMMERFIELD

By William Henry Rhodes

With an Introduction by Geraldine Bonner

THE INTRODUCTION

The greatest master of the short story our country has known found his
inspiration and produced his best work in California. It is now nearly
forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of
successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the
trail blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds,
realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material
much that was good has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed
some; weeklies, that lived for a brief day, carried others to the grave
with them. Now and then chance or design interposed, and some fragment
of value was not allowed to perish. It is matter for congratulation that
the story in this volume was one of those saved from oblivion.

In 1871 a San Francisco paper published a tale entitled The Case of
Summerfield. The author concealed himself under the name of "Caxton," a
pseudonym unknown at the time. The story made an immediate impression,
and the remote little world by the Golden Gate was shaken into startled
and enquiring astonishment. Wherever people met, The Case of Summerfield
was on men's tongues. Was Caxton's contention possible? Was it true
that, by the use of potassium, water could be set on fire, and that
any one possessing this baneful secret could destroy the world? The
plausibility with which the idea was presented, the bare directness
of the style, added to its convincing power. It sounded too real to be
invention, was told with too frank a simplicity to be all imagination.
People could not decide where truth and fiction blended, and the name of
Caxton leaped into local fame.

The author of the tale was a lawyer, W. H. Rhodes, a ma