“There was nothing to be said; the facts were against it. The victim was caught. There was no staying the hand of the law; one could see this very well as the Sheriff gripped his gun and drew himself up to his full height. Standing there, his gaunt shadow thrown against the wall, his white face etched deep with marks of hardship and of toil, he poked the muzzle of his gun between the rafters and fired. He had done his job, and so he left without another word. “Now, the morning after ‘The Girl of the Golden West’ opened, one or two critics declared that I did not know the times; they said that my gambler, so distinctively played by Frank Keenan, was a caricature, that he was taken from prints rather than from life. Why, I know the period of ’Forty-nine as I know my alphabet, and there are things in my ‘The Girl of the Golden West’ truer than many of the incidents in Bret Harte!” A MASTERPIECE OF STAGECRAFT: THE STORM IN “THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST.” Considered technically, Belasco’s production of “The Girl of the Golden West” was a genuine masterpiece of stagecraft, and it is specially memorable for the perfect example it exhibited of the right use of “realism” in the Theatre,--the use, in this instance, of an artfully created and perfect semblance of Nature in one of her wildest, most terrible moods as a background,--always felt, yet never obtruded,--for dramatic action the effect of which it steadily augmented and enforced. Nothing of the kind which I have ever seen in the Theatre has fully equalled in verisimilitude the blizzard on Cloudy Mountain as depicted by Belasco in the Second Act of this fine melodrama--such a bitter and cruel storm of wind-driven snow and ice as he had often suffered under in the strolling days of his nomadic youth. When the scene, the interior of the _Girl’s_ log-cabin, was disclosed the spectators perceived, dimly, through windows at the back, a far vista of rugged, snow-clad mountains which gradually faded from vision as the fall of snow increased and the casements became obscured by sleet. Then, throughout the progress of the action, intensifying the sense of desolation, dread, and terror, the audience heard the wild moaning and shrill whistle of the gale, and at moments, as the tempest rose to a climax of fury, could see the fine-powdered snow driven in tiny sprays and eddies through every crevice of the walls and the very fabric of the cabin quiver and rock beneath the impact of terrific blasts of wind,--long-shrieking down the mountain sides before they struck,--while in every fitful pause was audible the sharp click-click-click of freezing snow driving on wall and window.