“We had many a desperate fight with sheriffs and their posses, many a wild ride over the hills and through the pine woods on dark nights, and many a day of lying hidden in the brush or in caves.

“I followed that sort of life for two years, and then, one day, I suddenly felt a disgust for it all, and concluded I ’d had enough revenge and was ready to be an honest man again.

“So I deliberately left that part of the State and everybody supposed that Grizzly Dick had been killed and his body carried off and buried by his gang.  But nothing of the sort had happened.  He reappeared under another name a good many days’ travel from that region.

“Five or six years afterwards I went back to that same county and was elected sheriff.  Yes, I was recognized.  A good many people suspected and two or three openly declared that I was Grizzly Dick.  But I made the best sheriff they had ever had, and I did some work in the way of catching a stage robber, cleaning out a nest of gamblers, and getting rid of a couple of desperadoes, which they were so glad to have done that they didn’t care who or what I might have been.

“I served two terms and they wanted me to run again.  But by that time I had come to realize that I had frittered away a big part of my life, and I began to have some of the ambitions to accomplish something worth while that I ought to have had a dozen years before.

“So I went down to San Francisco and raised a tidy sum of money to begin on by going in with an acquaintance on a trip to Bering Sea to catch otters.  We chartered a vessel, spent a whole summer up there, and realized nearly ten thousand dollars apiece out of it.

“I had a pretty good practical knowledge of mining matters, and so my operations in mines and mining stocks were generally successful.  It was n’t long until I was a rich, a very rich, man, and a prominent one, too.  There is a street named for me in San Francisco.  That is, it bears the name I was known by while I was sheriff and while I lived in the city.  I married and built a fine residence, and altogether I was as prosperous and had as bright a future as any man in California.

“But one day, after I had been living in San Francisco five or six years, I made a deal that wasn’t a success, and half my fortune went in less than a week.  And at the same time I discovered that my wife was not all I had thought her.  She had evil tendencies that I had not suspected, and bad companions of whom I had known nothing; and together they had taken her at a flying pace down the road to destruction.  And when the end came, at the same time that I had my first financial blow, the surprise was overwhelming.  It was an end so shameful and to me so humiliating that I could not bear at first to go out among men and meet my friends.  It was a critical time and my affairs needed my closest attention.  But I was too broken down and overcome by the disgrace to attempt to do anything.  And when I did go back everything was ruined.