William MacLeod Raine was a small boy when he came to this country in 1881 from London, England, with his father and brothers. They settled in the Southwest, then a land lawless at times and places. Jesse James and Billy the Kid still terrorized the districts in which they lived. Most of the characters mentioned in this book were alive, and vigorously fighting for or against the law, while Raine was growing up.
After his graduation from Oberlin College, in Ohio, young Raine returned to the West and lived there, although with frequent excursions to other parts of the world. He had been a newspaper reporter, an editorial writer, a university lecturer, and a contributor to magazines.
For more than sixty years Raine was in and of the West. He knew personally some of the men whose adventures he tells of in this book, and from other of their friends and acquaintances he picked up details and anecdotes. Even in his fiction Raine was noted for the accuracy with which he portrays the spirit and the background of the locale in which his characters move.
