THE REIGN OF SOAPY SMITH
By William Ross Collier and Edwin Victor Westrate
This book (Cassell, 7s. 6d.) has that quality of free innocence with which American adults regard the doings of the bad man with the good heart. Unfortunately, the authors seern to be unaware of Henry James' dogma " that what is merely stated is not presented." They make too many " mere statements " about Jefferson Randolph (Soapy) Smith, who abandcined his home in Georgia to answer the call of " the wild; untrammelled West of the last quarter of the nineteenth century." Having been a cowboy and a shell-pea-man (thimble- rigger), Soapy won his spurs by selling soap cubes supposed to be wrapped in dollar bills. He became the first racketeer, the grand type of film-gangster, was " Monarch of Misrule " in the cities of the Colorado and Klondike during the gold- rush, and was shot dead by Vigilantes four days after he had been chosen as patriotic Grand Marshal of the Independence Day parade in Skagway. Soapy did all the correct things-- fleeced the greenhorn, helped the poor, respected " religion," and " gambled with his life." Some of his adventures make exciting reading, but there is a sameness about them which becomes boring. The late Mr. Foviler would have enjoyed the " elegant variations " employed in this book. "Paste- board pastime," meaning a game of cards, and "gubernatorial office," meaning the functions of a Governor, surely deserve to be recorded.
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