The Lone Star Gambler; or, The Maid of the Magnolias

# The Lone Star Gambler: or, The Maid of the Magnolias

By "Buckskin Sam" (Major Sam S. Hall), this Texas romance serializes in an 1908 pulp magazine. The narrative introduces the Carbury plantation near the Rio Brazos and Mexican Gulf, five years before the Civil War. Colonel Lafayette Carbury, a wealthy but morose planter, has two children: James, a twenty-year-old gambler and carouser, and Cora, a golden-haired girl of fourteen. Across the bayou lives widow Adelaide Adler with her eighteen-year-old son Charles, a scholarly youth. Despite their parents' bitter enmity—stemming from a disputed boundary line, legal defeat, and subsequent duel that wounded both men—young Charles and Cora have secretly fallen in love, meeting clandestinely. The installment establishes the romantic conflict between the star-crossed lovers and hints at dramatic complications to come.