Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 661

This issue of *Beadle and Adams* (March 25, 1890) contains "Banner Ben, the Wildfire of the Prairie: Old Kit Bandy's Deliverance" by Oll Coomes, a Western adventure serial. The narrative follows Old Compass, a gaunt, whip-skilled ranchero who delivers cattle to the isolated mining camp of Roaring Rocks in Southern Colorado. When Compass joins a poker game against the seemingly cordial stranger Thomas Shalon, he wins decisively. Shalon reveals himself as Captain Blood, the Mountain Outlaw, but Compass produces a derringer and identifies himself as Kit Bandy, a celebrated Mountain Detective. After a violent struggle involving Bandy's associate Ichabod Flea, Blood is subdued with a bottle and captured. A lynch mob gathers, but Blood offers Bandy crucial information about the "Hampton Crime and Conspiracy"—a case Bandy has long investigated—in exchange for protection.