In the spring of 1891, Mr. Nat Goodwin was one of the most popular and successful, as well as one of the most skilful, of American actors.  He had played lively and slight farces almost exclusively; but, having the ability for serious work as well, he was ambitious to try it.  In a comedy by Brander Matthews and George H. Jessop, called “A Gold Mine,” he had given one or two dramatic scenes most convincingly; and one sentimental soliloquy with a rose in exquisite tenderness.  In person he is under the average height[2]; and then, was slight, graceful, and with a face capable of conveying the subtlest shades of feeling.  The forehead was ample; the eyes were large and blue, clear and steady.  The nose was mildly Roman; the hair was the colour of new hay.  His voice was rich and modulated.  These points are reported because they helped form the equipment of the “star,” who wanted a serious play in which he should be the hero.  The order was without other conditions; the play might be of any period and of any land.

My own ignorance fixed certain limitations.  At that time I had acquaintance with no other countries than the United States and Canada.  These I knew fairly well.  I had travelled them with one-night theatrical companies; and also in newspaper assignments; and over restricted districts I had worked in the employment of a railroad company.  I didn’t care to write from books; so my Goodwin hero was to be perforce an American.  It seemed best to make him an American of 1891.  Other times and places were excluded and dismissed from mind.

Now, a blond hero five feet seven inches tall and weighing under one hundred and fifty-pounds—­a Roman nose, and a steady, steel blue gaze!

I stood the Goodwin photograph on my table and looked at it until it talked to me.  The slight physique couldn’t explain the solid confidence of that look except there was behind it a gun.  We were doing more man to man shooting in the country then than now; and my Western friendships made me more tolerant of the gun than some others were.  Goodwin and a gun sent me searching mentally over the West from Colorado to the Coast, and through all occupations from bandit to fighting parson; and then my potential gallery, quite apart from any conscious effort of my own, divided itself into two kinds of gunpackers:  the authorized and the others.  I concluded that there would be less trouble, less “lost motion”—­that was a phrase learned, and an idea applied in the old-fashioned composing-room—­less lost motion, in portraying a lawful gun toter than in justifying an outlaw; and the Goodwin part was therefore to be either a soldier or a sheriff.  I have said that he was thin, graceful—­and he was, but he wasn’t particularly erect.  He was especially free from any suggestion of “setting-up:”  sheriff was the way of least resistance.

My hero was a sheriff.  You see how that clears the atmosphere.  When you must, or may, write for a “star,” it is a big start to have the character agreeably and definitely chosen.