The golden trail is an actuality for me. The camp on the lake was mine. The rain, the snow I met. The prying camp-robbers, the grouse, the muskrats, the beaver were my companions. But Berrie was with me only in imagination. She is a fiction, born of a momentary, powerful hand-clasp of a Western rancher's daughter. The story of Wayland Norcross is fiction also. But the McFarlane ranch, the mill, and the lonely ranger-stations are closely drawn pictures of realities. Although the stage of my comedy is Colorado, I have not held to any one locality. The scene is composite. It was my intention, originally, to write a much longer and more important book concerning Supervisor McFarlane, but Berrie took the story into her own strong hands and made of it something so intimate and so idyllic that I could not bring the more prosaic element into it. It remained personal and youthful in spite of my plans, a divergence for which, perhaps, most of my readers will be grateful. As for its title, I had little to do with its selection. My daughter, Mary Isabel, aged ten, selected it from among a half-dozen others, and for luck I let it stand, although it sounds somewhat like that of a paper-bound German romance. For the sub-title my publishers are responsible. Finally, I warn the reader that this is merely the very slender story of a young Western girl who, being desired of three strong men, bestows her love on a "tourist" whose weakness is at once her allurement and her care. The administration problem, the sociologic theme, which was to have made the novel worth while, got lost in some way on the low trail and never caught up with the lovers. I'm sorry--but so it was! Chicago, January, 1914. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE FORESTER'S DAUGHTER ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE FORESTER'S DAUGHTER I THE HAPPY GIRL The stage line which ran from Williams to Bear Tooth (one of the most authentic then to be found in all the West) possessed at least one genuine Concord coach, so faded, so saddened, so cracked, and so splintered that its passengers entered it under protest, and alighted from it with thanksgiving, and yet it must have been built by honorable men, for in 190- it still made the run of one hundred and twenty miles twice each week without loss of wheel or even so much as moulting a scrap of paint. And yet, whatever it may have been in its youth, it was in its age no longer a gay dash of color in the landscape. On the contrary, it fitted into the dust-brown and sage-green plain as defensively as a beetle in a dusty path. Nevertheless, it was an indispensable part of a very moving picture as it crept, creaking and groaning (or it may be it was the suffering passenger creaking and groaning), along the hillside.