Beadle's New York Dime Library No. 957

# "The King-Pin Sport; or, The Missing Miner's Double Claimants"

This serialized story by Joseph E. Badger, Jr., appearing in Beadle and Adams No. 957 (1897), opens with a Western action sequence: a fugitive on a dying horse flees across a mountain trail pursued by an armed man firing a Winchester rifle. After a series of narrow escapes—his horse shot, himself tumbling down rocky ledges but caught by brush and narrow shelves—the hunted man eventually shakes his pursuer and reaches Leadville, Colorado, a silver-mining boomtown. There he spots his mysterious attacker in the moonlight and cries out in despair. The narrative then shifts to the "Good Luck" Saloon, where Thomas Gayworthy, nicknamed "Ten-Strike Tom" or "King-Pin Sport," surveys the rough mining-camp crowd. The proprietor, "Pop-eyed Moses," is described as honest and capable. The story involves rival claimants to a missing miner's claim, though the full conflict remains undeveloped in this excerpt.