Beadle's Pocket Library No. 169

# Catalog Note

"The Boy Champion: Dutch Herman of the Muskingum" by Edward Willett is an adventure serial set on the Ohio River. Sixteen-year-old Fred Light, known as "Featherweight" for his boxing prowess, leaves a flatboat at Cairo with his German companion Hermann Schweitopfel. After a dispute with a hotel clerk and porter—whom Fred defeats in boxing matches—a well-dressed man named Alfred Creswell approaches him. Creswell, a Memphis cotton merchant, proposes hiring Fred to retrieve his runaway niece, Sophie Creswell, who is hiding on a store-boat (the Western World) owned by George Collis. The girl fled after Creswell rejected her Missouri suitor. Creswell offers fifty dollars to coax or forcibly take Sophie to the Missouri shore. Fred agrees to investigate before accepting the job. The narrative combines river adventure with mystery, athletic action sequences, and emerging plot complications.