Beadle's Pocket Library No. 148

This 1886 Beadle and Adams weekly serializes "Thunderbolt Tom, the Wolf-Herder of the Rockies" by Harry St. George, a frontier adventure about a skilled hunter named Thunderbolt Tom whose reputation rivals Kit Carson and Grizzly Adams. Discovering a remote mountain cabin housing a giant wolf-herder named Wallace and his pack of captive wolves, Tom spies through a trap door and overhears a conspiracy: a masked man called "the Colonel," the brutal Colorado (branded "thief" on his forehead by Tom years earlier), and Wallace plot to murder Tom by feeding him to the starved wolves. A captive golden-haired woman sits bound in the cabin. Enraged at overhearing his own death sentence, Tom dramatically crashes through the trap door to confront them, declaring himself "the required lamb ready to be led to the slaughter."