Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 448

This is the opening chapter of "Nickel-Plate Ned" by Edward L. Wheeler, from Beadle and Adams' Fifteenth Edition weekly, February 23, 1886. The story is set in Bozeman, Montana, where Ned Neville, a young cashier at banker Maurice Mansfield's bank, converses with Mansfield's seventeen-year-old daughter Mabel in the family parlor. Neville, harboring a mysterious past, attempts to end their acquaintance to protect her reputation. When Mansfield enters, he confronts Neville about a two-thousand-dollar cash shortage in the bank's accounts and reveals rumors questioning the propriety of Neville and Mabel's friendship. The confrontation escalates when Mansfield, enraged at both the missing funds and the supposed scandal, denounces Neville's presence in Bozeman and blames him for compromising his daughter's name.