I would give much to own it, but Tejada
will not give it up without Bass's permission, and Bass has gone to the
Klondike.
As to Karslake himself. He was born in Raleigh, in North Carolina, in
1868, studied law at the State University, and went to the Bahamas in
1885 with the members of a government coast survey commission. Gave up
the practice of law and "went in" for fiction and the study of the
ethnology of North America about 1887. He was unmarried.
The reasons for his enlisting have long been misunderstood. It was known
that at the time of his death he was a member of B Troop of the Sixth
Regiment of United States Cavalry, and it was assumed that because of
this fact Karslake was in financial difficulties and not upon good terms
with his family. All this, of course, is untrue, and I have every reason
to believe that Karslake at this time was planning a novel of military
life in the Southwest, and, wishing to get in closer touch with the
_milieu_ of the story, actually enlisted in order to be able to write
authoritatively. He saw no active service until the time when his
narrative begins. The year of his death is uncertain. It was in the
spring probably of 1896, in the twenty-eighth year of his age.
There is no doubt he would have become in time a great writer. A young
man of twenty-eight who had so lively a sense of the value of accurate
observation, and so eager a desire to produce that in the very face of
death he could faithfully set down a description of his surroundings,
actually laying down the rifle to pick up the pen, certainly was
possessed of extraordinary faculties.
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