Beadle's New York Dime Library No. 573

# Catalog Note

The Man of Check: A Romance of California by Major D. Boone Dumont opens with impoverished prospectors Austin and Maria Frias in a cabin beneath Mount Shasta. Maria pressures her idle husband toward crime, specifically stage robbery. A stranger, Tom Heston, arrives offering whisky and proposing a partnership to rob a stage traveling from Sacramento to Glengartney at daybreak, targeting a wealthy passenger carrying valuable Comstock stock certificates. Heston provides the numbers of the specific securities they expect to steal. Meanwhile, at Crow Nest, a substantial hillside house, three men—Eric Kempton, Scottish settler Andrew Gartney, and Manuel del Castro—discuss organizing a vigilance committee to combat horse theft in the region, suspecting Austin Frias as a likely culprit. The narrative intersects crime plotting with frontier vigilantism, establishing conflict between the desperate Frias household and the established settlers of the hill country.