Beadle's New York Dime Library No. 439

This 1887 Beadle & Adams weekly serializes "The Swamp-Island Renegades: A Tale of the Everglades and Jungles" by Major D. Boone Dumont, author of "Silver Sam, the Detective."

The narrative opens with Emma Plympton defying her wealthy Pennsylvania father Benjamin by marrying Absalom Startle, a destitute former Confederate soldier and ex-convict. Disowned, Emma follows Startle through poverty and abuse to Florida, where she dies leaving behind a young son. Her deathbed letter to her father is lost in the mail. Benjamin, now failing in health, consults his friend Tom Cresswell in Cuba about providing for his daughter and grandchild, creating a will entrusted to Cresswell. Cresswell's brigantine, carrying the will and valuables, wrecks on the Florida coast with all hands lost.

Chapter II shifts to Danger Point on the Florida coast, where a small hut built from shipwreck debris shelters a weathered man and a sixteen-year-old boy named Sam. A horseman approaches across the tidal sand strip, seeking them out.