[Setting.  The group tragedy enacted in this story took place between November 23 and December 7, 1850, on the road from Poker Flat to Sandy Bar, in Sierra County, California.  The time and place are those that Bret Harte has made peculiarly his own.  The austerity and wildness of the scenery seem somehow to favor the intimate revelation of character that the story displays.  There is no intervention of cities, crops, fashions, or conventions between the different members of the character group or between the group as a whole and the reader.  All is bare like a white mountain peak.  Notice also how the background of a common peril draws the characters together and brings out at last the best in each.

Plot.  The story sets forth and interprets a dramatic situation.  The plot is staged so as to answer the question, “Do not the people whom society regards as outcasts have yet some redeeming virtue?” Notice especially how a sense of common fellowship is developed in these outcasts.  First, they are subjected to a common humiliation in being driven from Poker Flat by persons whom the outcasts consider no whit better than themselves.  Next, they are exposed to a common danger, a danger that leads the stronger to care instinctively for the weaker, and the weaker to recognize that it is nobler to give than to receive.  At last, in the unexpected entrance of the innocent Tom Simson and the guileless Piney Woods, the outcasts find a common challenge to the native goodness that had long lain dormant within them.  Innocence and guilelessness may be laughed at, as they are here, but their appeal is often stronger than the appeal of disciplined virtue or of self-conscious superiority.  When Bret Harte was charged with confusing the boundary lines of vice and virtue he replied that his plots “conformed to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the parable of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan.”

Characters.  Oakhurst, who is always called “Mr.”  Oakhurst, is of course the dominant character.  The story begins with him and ends with him.  He is “the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat,”—­strong while there was anything to be done, weak even to suicide when he had only to wait for the inevitable end.  He was a brave, desperate, solitary man, whose thought and speech and action, however, were always those of the professional gambler.  Bret Harte, who has put him into several stories, says of him in another place:  “Go where he would and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand.”  The admiration that we yield to such a man, though it is only a qualified admiration, is doubtless the admiration of power which, we cannot help thinking, might be used beneficently if it could only be harnessed to a noble cause.