A Memorandum Of Sudden Death
The manuscript of the account that follows belongs to a harness-maker in Albuquerque,
Juan Tejada by name, and he is welcome to whatever of advertisement this notice may
bring him. He is a good fellow, and his patented martingale for stage horses may be
recommended. I understand he got the manuscript from a man named Bass, or possibly
Bass left it with him for safe-keeping. I know that Tejada has some things of Bass's now--
things that Bass left with him last November: a mess-kit, a lantern and a broken
theodolite--a whole saddle-box full of contraptions. I forgot to ask Tejada how Bass got
the manuscript, and I wish I had done so now, for the finding of it might be a story itself.
The probabilities are that Bass simply picked it up page by page off the desert, blown
about the spot where the fight occurred and at some little distance from the bodies. Bass,
I am told, is a bone-gatherer by profession, and one can easily understand how he would
come across the scene of the encounter in one of his tours into western Arizona. My
interest in the affair is impersonal, but none the less keen. Though I did not know young
Karslake, I knew his stuff--as everybody still does, when you come to that. For the matter
of that, the mere mention of his pen-name, "Anson Qualtraugh," recalls at once to
thousands of the readers of a certain world-famous monthly magazine of New York
articles and stories he wrote for it while he was alive; as, for instance, his admirable
descriptive work called "Traces of the Aztecs on the Mogolon Mesa," in the October
number of 1890. Also, in the January issue of 1892 there are two specimens of his work,
one signed Anson Qualtraugh and the other Justin Blisset. Why he should have used the
Blisset signature I do not know. It occurs only this once in all his writings. In this case it
is signed to a very indifferent New Year's story. The Qualtraugh "stuff" of the same
number is, so the editor writes to me, a much shortened transcript of a monograph on
"Primitive Methods of Moki Irrigation," which are now in the archives of the
Smithsonian. The admirable novel, "The Peculiar Treasure of Kings," is of course well
known. Karslake wrote it in 1888-89, and the controversy that arose about the incident of
the third chapter is still--sporadically and intermittently--continued.
The manuscript that follows now appears, of course, for the first time in print, and I
acknowledge herewith my obligations to Karslake's father, Mr. Patterson Karslake, for
permission to publish.
I have set the account down word for word, with all the hiatuses and breaks that by nature
of the extraordinary circumstances under which it was written were bound to appear in it.
I have allowed it to end precisely as Karslake was forced to end it, in the middle of a
sentence. God knows the real end is plain enough and was not far off when the poor
fellow began the last phrase that never was to be finished.
The value of the thing is self-apparent. Besides the narrative of incidents it is a simple
setting forth of a young man's emotions in the very face of violent death. You will
remember the distinguished victim of the guillotine, a lady who on the scaffold begged
that she might be permitted to write out the great thoughts that began to throng her mind.
She was not allowed to do so, and the record is lost. Here is a case where the record is
