Beadle's Pocket Library No. 44

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The White Indian; or, The Scouts of the Yellowstone by Captain J. F. C. Adams (serial fiction, Beadle and Adams, 1884). In Chapter I, "A Perplexed Explorer," Duke Barlow returns to camp near the Yellowstone after a hunt when he observes a mysterious point of light moving across a distant ridge in a pendulum-like pattern. The light ascends the mountainside, hovers, then descends—its movements too large to be hand-held. Initially suspecting intoxication or hallucination, Barlow sobers himself and investigates. He hears an unearthly moan from above before discovering another white man, the deceptive Zadok Brown, crouching nearby. Brown claims to have witnessed something extraordinary but deflects, attributing it to a dream. The narrative combines frontier exploration adventure with mystery elements, mixing encounters with Indian tribes and unexplained phenomena in a Western setting.