Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 597

# "The Black Bravos: A Romance of General Cook's Rocky Mountain Man-Hunters"

This serial romance by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham is set at Ranger's Rest, Colonel Dillon Dumont's Texas ranch. Dumont, a New York aristocrat widowed from his Mexican wife (the daughter of Don Ramirez, whom he'd promised to marry years earlier), lives with his accomplished sixteen-year-old son Edgar, educated at a northern military academy. When a masked Black Bravo assassin confronts Dumont, he reveals himself as Gale Davenport, a former rival for a woman named Kate Kennerley. Both believed they'd lost her to the other years ago—Davenport through financial ruin and flight, Dumont through her apparent rejection. Learning she married neither and may still be unmarried, Davenport (now a wealthy outlaw leader) vows to claim her. Dumont, surrounded by Davenport's gang, challenges him to a moonlit duel by his wife's grave, stakes being the ranch if he loses.