Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 66

"A Life for a Life" by W. J. Hamilton (serialized, Chapter I-II)

A frontier adventure serializing in Beadle's Half-Dime Library. Two men—Ned Clayton, a nineteen-year-old ranger bound by oath to the older outlaw Jack Evans—shelter from a catastrophic Texas norther on the plains. They glimpse a beautiful girl (approximately sixteen) clinging desperately to a bolting black mustang. When the storm subsides, they trail her through rough terrain toward Rocky Gulch. At the ravine's edge they discover the mustang dead, its neck broken. Clayton descends via lariat into the chasm and finds the girl unconscious but alive, wedged in a pine tree thirty feet up—thrown there by the horse's fall and miraculously caught by the branches. Using improvised pulley systems, the men extract her and begin reviving her with whiskey and water. She regains consciousness as the excerpt closes, her condition uncertain but vital signs present.