Deadwood Dick Library No. 2: The Black Rider

This is the first issue of Newnes' Black Rider library, a serialized adventure publication. The catalog includes a title list for the Redskin Library series, featuring Colonel Buffalo Bill among Rio Grande Indian tribes, partnered with Pawnee Bill and Nick Wharton in episodes like "Buffalo Bill and the Three Finger Mine" and "Buffalo Bill and the Kidnapped Girl."

The main serial, The Black Rider, begins in Chapter I with a Deadwood, South Dakota newspaper office where reporter Augustus receives a threatening visit from a rough miner delivering a defiant advertisement from notorious road-agent Deadwood Dick, who promises retaliation against the Regulators who killed his gang in Big Lode Canyon. The announcement creates panic; townsmen offer a thousand-dollar bounty. Dashing Dave, a young Regulator leader, discusses the threat in a saloon before being confronted by a well-dressed stranger demanding his chair.

Chapter II shifts to a canyon where a seventeen-year-old girl named Leone and her companion Johnson, a Black man of "tremendous muscular power," hide from pursuing horsemen. Leone recognizes among the riders the villainous Jasper Leslie and Curtis Sydnor, who are hunting her. After the party passes, Leone and Johnson escape into a transverse canyon seeking refuge.