Beadle's Dime Library No. 372

1885 · 32 pages

"The Man With a Record" by Joseph E. Badger, Jr. This serialized Western romance opens at Good Enough Ranch in Texas, where Orabel Hilliard—a tall, dark-eyed beauty dressed in riding habit with revolvers at her waist—converses with the lovelorn Thomas Allen, a rotund Boston gentleman visiting with his sister Mary. Allen, hopelessly infatuated, struggles to confess his feelings while Orabel remains oblivious, instead confiding her romantic ideals: she seeks a husband who is a "Man With a Record," a commanding hero-figure rather than a devoted suitor. The narrative establishes Orabel's backstory—she and her brother Eugene were raised in Boston by their merchant father Morris Hilliard, who relocated to Texas to rebuild his fortune and died before reuniting them. Now at the ranch under the guardianship of Hilliard's friend Hurley Burr, Orabel pines for an idealized masculine hero while the earnest but physically unprepossessing Allen watches helplessly.

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