Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 186

# The Black Bravo: The Tonkaway's Triumph

This weekly pulp serial by "Buckskin Sam" (Major Sam S. Hall) is set on the Rio Frio in frontier Texas, twenty-one years prior to the narrative present. Colonel Jack Wellington maintains a remote ranch despite friends' warnings, later bringing his adopted daughter Flora, a beautiful sixteen-year-old educated in Galveston, to live there. Flora thrives in the wilderness landscape but becomes suspicious of Antonio, one of two Mexican ranch hands, whom she observes lurking suspiciously. On her seventeenth birthday, the Colonel reveals family secrets: Flora's mother was his lost love who married another man, was abandoned in poverty in New Orleans, and died. The Colonel adopted Flora after her mother's death. The narrative involves frontier dangers from bandits (Cortina, El Negro Bravo) and Apache/Comanche raids, while a mysterious figure eavesdrops from the veranda, suggesting Antonio harbors dangerous intentions toward the household.