Wildcat Bob, the Boss Bruiser

# Wildcat Bob, the Boss Bruiser; or, The Border Bloodhound

This Beadle & Adams dime novel by Edward L. Wheeler features two loosely-connected narratives. The opening chapters depict a criminal organization called the Bloodhound Band, led by a masked commander, conducting an initiation ritual on the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Jake Corrigan, seeking to join the gang, arranges to place an unconscious young woman across the railroad tracks, where an oncoming express train kills her. The second section shifts to Pompeii's Gulch, a Colorado mining settlement, where a rough gang led by "Big Hank" from Kansas arrives at the "Heifer Shebang" saloon intent on causing trouble. The narrative emphasizes frontier violence, criminal organization, and mining-camp conflict, with detailed descriptions of landscape and rough dialogue characteristic of the pulp western genre.