Beadle's Pocket Library No. 418

Catalog Note This issue features "Buckskin Sam's Wild Ride" and the serial "Plaza and Plain: Adventures of Major Sam S. Hall," both by Col. Prentiss Ingraham, author of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill stories. The narrative begins with fifteen-year-old Sam Stone Hall, a Massachusetts farm boy obsessed with Texas frontier life, working as a hotel boy in New York. While sleeping under a bed, he overhears two men plotting to assassinate a visiting Texan rancher for his money. Sam intervenes with a bed-wrench, killing one assassin and allowing the other to escape. The dying rancher, recognizing Sam's courage and Texas ambitions, entrusts him with money, his belt, and instructions to reach his Texas ranch, prevent unspecified villainy there, and tell his wife and daughter of his death. Sam pledges himself to the task. After the rancher's death and burial, Sam and his friend Joe Booth sail aboard a schooner toward Texas, receiving frontier advice from an experienced sailor called "Old Rocky" regarding Indians, weapons, and frontier etiquette. A tornado threatens their vessel near the Bahama Banks.