Beadle's Dime Library, No. 558

High Old Times at Hard Pan by Wm. R. Eyster opens with Hurrah Harry, a broke and beaten drifter, being offered a thousand-dollar stake by a generous stranger on the road to Hard Pan. Harry, recently robbed after a card game in Halcyon and nearly lynched, accepts the wager that he'll "shake Hard Pan from the ground up" within three weeks.

Arriving at dusk near Hard Pan, Harry witnesses a woman fleeing pursuers down a ravine slope toward a treacherous gorge. After shooting one attacker, he jumps into the dark water below to rescue the drowning woman. Despite dangerous rocks and the risk of hostile men awaiting above, he locates her in the water and retrieves her. Exhausted from a thirty-mile walk on an empty stomach, Harry carefully swims upstream toward the bridge and manages to climb out, carrying the unconscious woman on his shoulder.