Beadle's Pocket Library No. 76

This 1885 Beadle and Adams dime novel features "Watch-Eye, the Shadow: Arabs and Angels of a Great City" by Edward L. Wheeler, author of the Deadwood Dick series. The serialized narrative opens in Baltimore in the 1860s with money-lender Silas Pry confronted by Gerald Tracy, a financially ruined gentleman facing bank theft charges. Tracy confesses he stole fifty thousand dollars from his Washington bank to maintain his wife Marion's social standing. Desperate to avoid prosecution, he accepts Pry's predatory terms: a mortgage on his valuable plantation Riverdale for seventy-five thousand dollars to secure the fifty thousand he needs. Tracy signs the document with a nineteen-year deadline to reclaim his property, then flees west. The narrative jumps eighteen years forward to Philadelphia, where the story's main action commences with the residence of Judge Vermillye. The serial combines urban crime melodrama with financial intrigue, establishing Tracy's debt as a driving plot device.