The Cripple's Dead-Sure Clinch

This issue of *Beadle and Adams' Dime Library* contains the serialized story "Cripple's Dead Sure Clinch: Trapping the Old Fraud" by Charles Morris, beginning Chapter I. Andy Blake, a one-legged boy, and Dick Wilson, an amputee with one arm, confront mill owner John Somers seeking damages after machinery he negligently maintained crushed them. Somers refuses and expels them. In soliloquy, Somers reveals he deliberately caused the accident to silence Andy, the heir to a patent Somers had fraudulently obtained from Andy's now-deceased father through drunken coercion and forged witnesses. A mysterious well-dressed stranger encounters the boys afterward and, learning of both the recent injury and the earlier theft, invites them inside to discuss pursuing justice. The narrative establishes a revenge plot against Somers, combining industrial accident litigation with uncovering past fraud.