"A strange, wild story it is too, and perhaps worth the telling, if only for the reason that the stage on which it was enacted has so completely changed that the scenes in which the adventurer took his part, and the life he led in the far West and South, can never recur as long as the world endures. Civilisation, railways, and the advancing tide of population have swept them into the linbo of forgotten things so completely that it is hard to realise that such a state of society could ever really have existed only forty or fifty years ago." ~ from the introduction.