Beadle's New York Dime Library No. 441

"Trail of the Gold Grandes" — Captain Howard Holmes This serialized Western adventure opens in Denver during a mining boom. David Dresden, secretly the bankrupt English baronet Sir Harold Harcourt who fled from England years ago, has amassed wealth through mining luck. He lives as a recluse but is preparing to leave Denver with his fortune to resume searching for his wife and daughter Leonore, who vanished sixteen years prior under mysterious circumstances. A stranger, Edwin Alden, visits Dresden's home and reveals he knows his true identity and past, including suspicions surrounding bones found in the family's deer park. Alden violently robs Dresden at gunpoint, binding him to a chair and using burglar tools to crack his safe, stealing the entirety of his wealth before escaping. Simultaneously, an accomplice named Nicholas Norway receives an encrypted telegram near the Union Pacific line and ascends a telegraph pole during a storm, apparently sabotaging the line at ten o'clock.