Beadle's Pocket Library No. 309

# Museum Catalog Note

Old Graybeard's Boy: The Girl's Ruse by C. Dunning Clark (serialized). A frontier adventure serial set in Kentucky's lawless mountain region. The Moonshine Men, a band of sixty armed outlaws led by Captain Paul Forsythe, capture United States Deputy Marshal Edgar Steyne, a former military officer whom Forsythe blames for his dismissal from service. The gang votes to execute Steyne. Two men transport him to a remote valley where they bind him to a wooden stake planted in quicksand, positioning him to slowly sink to his death while they play cards beneath a tree. Steyne refuses to beg for mercy. A grizzled mountaineer named Rube Burley, "Old Graybeard," arrives and questions the execution, confronting the two murderers. The serial continues beyond this excerpt, evidently introducing Burley's intervention and the promised "girl's ruse" of the subtitle.