Beadle's Dime Library No. 3

This issue features the opening installment of "Kit Carson, Jr., the Crack Shot of the West," a wild-life romance by Major S. S. Hall (pseudonym "Buckskin Sam"), set in Texas during 1860. The narrative follows five Texas Rangers—Captain John Donaldson, Lieutenant Cole McRay, Reckless Joe, Texas Bill, and Bill Mann—as they travel to Banketta Creek to organize against the outlaw Cortina and his approximately seven-hundred-man force that has been raiding ranches between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers. The author includes a digression explaining the Mexican peon system as context for recruitment into outlaw gangs. At the Rangers' camp, a mysterious figure called "Wild Will" arrives on a bloodied, foam-flecked horse, stabbing it repeatedly with his bowie-knife while emitting "wild, maniac yells." The narrative reveals Wild Will is a wanderer whose wife and children were previously murdered and mutilated, driving him to madness.