Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 462

"The Sailor Boy Wanderer" by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham This serial adventure opens on the prairie where a bearded frontiersman abandons a sleeping child at camp, taking the horses to secure an inheritance. The child, six-year-old Foxie—dressed in buckskins and recently brought from the East—awakens to find himself alone. Following the horse tracks, he walks all day before reaching a stream. As darkness falls, wolves surround his tree refuge until a passing borderman rescues him with gunfire, killing a dozen beasts. The kind stranger offers the orphaned waif shelter and provisions. However, that night, a band of twenty or more Native Americans attack the camp, believing a log by the fire to be a human target. The plainsman returns fire through the shanty's opening, killing and wounding several attackers before tearing through the rear wall and fleeing toward his staked horse with the boy.