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 poems and prose narratives deliberately adulterate his facts with imaginary elements in the interest of romance, and like his early model Lord Byron, he enjoyed and encouraged identification of himself with all his hard-riding, hard-fighting, and amorous heroes. Secondly, he tells us that as a result of his arrow wound in the head and neck at the Battle of Castle Rocks, "on the 15th day of June, 1855," he lost his memory for months, was "nearly a year" in recovering, and was somewhat feeble minded for some time after. Thirdly, if he ever actually became a renegade and participated in outlaw raids, when he returned to civilization, he indulged in wise "lapses of memory."

With a consciousness, then, that we are treading the uncertain border between fact and fiction, we pull the arrow from Joaquin's neck in the summer of 1855, and commit him to the care of an Indian woman, who treats him as her son. Late in the fall, restored at last to his senses and beginning to recover his strength, he teaches school in a mining camp near Shasta City at night and tries to mine by day—rather strenuous activities for a feeble-minded convalescent! But in the following spring, 1856, he again joins the red men on the mountain. "When the Modocs rose up one night and massacred eighteen men, every man in Pitt River Valley, I alone was spared"—thus runs the introduction to the Bear Edition—"and spared only because I was Los bobo, the fool. Then more bat-