Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 339

This 1884 Beadle & Adams dime novel by Edward L. Wheeler features "Kangaroo Kit's Racket: The Pride of Played-Out," a Western adventure. The story is set in the declining mining camp of Played-Out, controlled by the schemer Lawton Leech, who covets both the town's best unclaimed property—owned by the drunken old Frenchman Roth Roulere—and Roulere's young ward Mai, a seventeen-year-old girl who performs music at Tim Flannigan's saloon to support herself. When two mysterious strangers arrive by stage, one a ministerial-looking man in black and the other the brutish "Big Blacksnake," a violent confrontation erupts at the saloon. The man in black defeats Blacksnake in combat, then attempts suicide before being stopped by Christofer Bricktop, a wiry, red-haired youth from Boston who intervenes and introduces himself as "Kangaroo Kit."