Beadle's New York Dime Library No. 788

This issue of Beadle and Adams's The Night-Hawk Detective (No. 788, 1893) contains two serials by Captain Howard Holmes. "The Night-Hawk Detective: Trapping the Tigers in New York" appears as the lead feature, while "The Last of the Branded Band" constitutes the main installment.

In the latter, cabdriver Jack Horrox picks up a distraught woman near Union Square who demands to be returned immediately after reaching Grand Street. She drops an incomplete note addressed to detective Jasper Joyce—the "Night-Hawk"—warning that Miles Maccoon has been murdered and she possesses knowledge of the crime. Joyce consults his records and discovers an entry from 1888 about a mysterious woman named Zira connected to a "secret league" whose members bear a branded "D." Meanwhile, an informant named Nickum Nox arrives to report that Gorell Grimm, a man living under an assumed name, has died under suspicious circumstances. Joyce realizes Grimm and Maccoon are the same person, connecting the threads of an emerging mystery.