Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 834

Catalog Entry *Deadwood Dick, Jr.'s Proxy* by Edward L. Wheeler, published in this Beadle and Adams weekly (July 18, 1898), features a dramatic confrontation. Chapter I: "The Combat on the Cliff" opens with Deadwood Dick Bristol encountering a masked opponent, later revealed as Elmer St. Clair, whom Dick seeks as the murderer of St. Clair's wife. The two engage in a desperate unarmed struggle atop a mountain precipice near Yellowstone Park. St. Clair gains the upper hand, suspends Dick over the cliff, and drops him to his death in the gorge below after extracting a message for Dick's wife. Chapter II, "A Batch of New-Comers," shifts to Pistol Butte, a mining camp near Yellowstone. A flamboyantly dressed stranger in all-red leather (calling himself "Gold Jack of California") checks into the Park House Hotel, followed by a tall masked woman registering as "Keen Kate, Card-Sharp," and a man known as "Captain Mask," whose true identity remains mysterious.