Beadle's Dime Library, No. 731

Catalog Note This October 1892 Beadle and Adams dime novel contains "Silk Lasso Sam, The Outlaw of the Overland" by Col. Prentiss Ingraham. The serialized story opens with two retired Army officers—a colonel and major—who arrange the immediate marriage of their thirteen-year-old granddaughter and eighteen-year-old grandson to fulfill their own wishes after their daughters married against their consent. The youth is sent back to West Point; the bride returns to boarding school. The narrative then follows the cadet's graduation, where a vagabond reveals himself as the boy's father, supposedly lost at sea years prior. The father has secretly tested his son's character; he is actually wealthy and merely disguised. A third plot involves an old gentleman visiting a life-sentence convict (Convict Number Seventy) at the penitentiary. The prisoner was falsely imprisoned for bank robbery and murder. The visitor reveals his own deceased son confessed on his deathbed to framing the innocent man; he promises the prisoner freedom and offers to make the prisoner's daughter his heir.