Beadle's Pocket Novels No. 198: Black John

This issue of Beadle and Adams pulp fiction, published in 1878, features "Black John, the Road-Agent; or, The Prairie Sink," by Jos. E. Badger Jr., a Western adventure serial set in early Kansas. The narrative opens with a stagecoach fording a creek during a storm, carrying multiple passengers: the driver Ben Cockles, the scarred borderer Curly, the braggadocio real-estate speculator Frank Kershaw (who claims vast wealth and boasts of killing a buffalo at 200 yards), Kent Morgan, and two young women—May Howard and Eunice Lee—returning home from Eastern boarding school. As the coach crosses Little Wildcat Creek, the notorious outlaw Black John intercepts it, demanding toll. Black John is described as a grotesquely scarred, physically massive man of dark complexion with a disfigured face, wielding multiple revolvers and commanding a masked gang of armed riders. He announces he will rob the male passengers but spare the women.