excerpt from the book.._In the Boys' Golden West Series I have done my best to present to itsreaders the West that I knew as a boy.__Frontier days were made up of many different kinds of humans. Therewere men who were muddy-bellied coyotes, so low that they hugged theground like a snake. There were girls whose cheeks were so toughened byshame as to be hardly knowable from squaws. There were stoic Indianswith red-raw, liquor-dilated eyes, peaceable and just when sober,boastful and intolerant when drunk. And then there were those White Men,those moulders, those makers of the great, big open-hearted West, thathad not yet been denatured by nesters and wire fences, men to whom aColt gun was the court of last appeal and who did not carry a warrant intheir pockets until it was worn out, men who faced staggering odds anddanger single-handed and alone, men who created and worked out and madean Ideal Civilization,--a country where doors were left unlocked atnight and the windows of the mind were always open,--men who werealways kind to the weak and unprotected, even if they did have hoofs andhorns, men like William B. (Bat) Masterson and Wyatt Earp. They andtheir kind made the frontier, that Great West which we can now look backupon as the most romantic era of our American History._