Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 41

This 1878 Beadle and Adams dime novel contains "The Young Mustanger" by Oll Coomes, a Western frontier adventure serialized across multiple chapters. The opening establishes two young mustangers—the renowned Lasso Jack (not yet twenty) and his companion Henry St. Elmo—being pursued across Texas prairie by a Comanche war party. After a desperate chase, they attempt to cross a creek, though St. Elmo mysteriously disappears during the crossing. Meanwhile, a separate wagon train led by fifty-year-old Captain Louis Gray is escorting his nieces Mabel and Rosalind Garfield to Santa Fe, accompanied by traders, soldiers, a guide named Dan Dorne, and an Englishman Sir George Richardson. The train discovers a human skull impaled in a tree near their camp, prompting recognition from their guide of the location's dark history.