A Tough Boy; or, The Dwarf's Revenge

A Tough Boy; or, The Dwarf's Revenge by Philip S. Warne appears in this January 1884 Beadle and Adams dime novel. The opening chapters establish a frontier adventure: experienced hunter Honest Jack and his young partner Charley camp in a wilderness mountain gorge. Charley discovers a spectacular crystalline cave he calls a "cave of wonders"—a vast natural cathedral of colored jasper and mineral formations. Jack warns it is haunted, recounting a series of deaths connected to the cave: a tenderfoot's mysterious fall, quarreling prospectors found murdered, a superstitious man struck dead in a saloon, and Jack's former partner Joe who apparently went mad from the curse and disappeared into a mountain sink-hole. Despite Jack's warnings, they camp inside the cave. That night Charley experiences a horrifying dream-vision of ghostly forms touching him with icy hands, then inexplicably awakens outside in deep snow with the camp relocated—as if the cave were never entered. Honest Jack has slept abnormally through the night and morning, proving difficult to rouse.