Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 916

# Deadwood Dick, Jr.'s Double-Decker (1895)

Beadle and Adams published this serialized adventure in issue 916, volume 36. The featured story, credited to Edward L. Wheeler (author of the Deadwood Dick novels), is "The Shadow Coffin," a mystery-adventure set in Roaring River, Nevada, a silver mining camp noted for its hydraulic mining operations and the falls that power them.

The narrative opens when a mysterious shadow-coffin appears suspended in mid-air within the crowded barroom of the Lullaby Roost hotel. Inside the spectral coffin appears the corpse of Joseph Mainard, the proprietor himself, who faints upon witnessing the apparition. The mysterious stranger Center-fire (also called Edgar Vandorn) arrives immediately after and becomes the focus of suspicion. Mainard recovers and offers Center-fire five hundred dollars to identify the prankster responsible, despite questioning whether it was truly a trick or something more supernatural.