Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 198

This issue of Beadle and Adams' weekly (Vol. VIII, No. 198, May 10, 1881) contains "Arkansaw, the Man with the Knife; or, The Queen of Fate's Revenge," a mining-country adventure by T.C. Harbaugh. Set in the San Juan silver region, the serial depicts Gold Conrad, the wealthy owner of secret mines at Vulture Bar, who sends his Apache servant Catana with a warning message to Colonel Thunder after spotting a mysterious knife-thrower who pins a woodpecker to his gate-post. A large, bearded desperado calling himself "the Rosebud of the Pink Forks" arrives unbidden at Conrad's window and offers to kill the knife-thrower—or Conrad himself—forcing Conrad to choose. The narrative follows Conrad's subsequent attempts to reach Thunder, his rebuff by a young man named Halleck, and shifts to Vulture Bar, where six of Conrad's watchdogs supervise the silver mining operations and watch over the miners gambling nearby.