Beadle's Pocket Library, No. 204

This issue of Beadle and Adams' weekly from December 7, 1887 features "The Young Cowboy; or, The Girl Trailer's Triumph" by Col. Prentiss Ingraham. The serial opens with a conspiracy: Judge Dorsey Langdon and his unscrupulous son Loyd plot to defraud an inheritance from the judge's deceased brother. Loyd plans to travel to Texas to murder his cousin Lester, then impersonate him years later to claim a half-million-dollar estate. The narrative then shifts to eighteen-year-old Lester, the rightful heir, who works as a ranch hand in western Texas. After his patron Don Bartolo dies, Lester inherits the ranch. He soon observes three approaching riders, one being a woman held captive. The cowboy captures a deceptive soldier claiming to bear dispatches, then confronts the soldier's accomplice, who kidnaps the captive woman. After a gunfight, the accomplice falls. The story combines inheritance fraud, western action, and rescue elements.