Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 347

This issue of Beadle and Adams' Weekly (Vol. XIV, No. 347, 1884, 5 cents) features the opening chapters of "Deadwood Dick's Ducats: Rainy Days in the Diggings" by Edward L. Wheeler, author of the Deadwood Dick novel series.

The narrative follows Roaring Ruth, an eighteen-year-old girl prospector, and her partner Dutch Dave as they travel to Devil's Diggings in Arizona during an approaching rainstorm. Dave directs them to a dying man sheltering under a mountain ledge. Ruth discovers the wounded man is Deadwood Dick himself—a famous (or infamous) figure with substantial bounties on his head. Dick reveals he has cached thirty thousand dollars in coined gold near Devil's Diggings, accumulated from secret mining operations with his partner Harry Leelede. Suspecting betrayal, Dick removed the gold to a safer location. Shot through the heart and mortally wounded, Dick offers Ruth the treasure if she hunts his assassin. He begins to sketch a map revealing the cache's location, but the wind tears away the crucial document before Ruth can read it, and Dick dies moments later.