Beadle's Dime Library, No. 273

About this issue

This pulp serial by Major Sam S. Hall (pseudonym "Buckskin Sam"), author of Diamond Dick and Kit Carson Jr., concerns Light Horse Leon's encounters with the mountain outlaw title character. The featured narrative opens in 1850s Virginia with Colonel Andrews, an impoverished Virginia planter of old gentry, preparing to migrate his household to Texas. His lovely fifteen-year-old daughter Arline, described in considerable physical detail, accompanies a hunting party to the Blue Ridge Mountains. While the adults hunt, she rides her pony Gypsy along the foothills, accompanied by Jumbo Jim, an enslaved family servant, who proves superstitious about the wild gorge. Arline ventures deep into an dark gulch where her pony startles at a bear cub. Jumbo Jim shoots the cub; the mother bear then fatally mauls him. A youth of eighteen, armed and dressed in buckskin, hears Arline's screams from a high rocky shelf above the gorge. The text breaks before his intervention, leaving her cornered by the enraged bear. The narrative emphasizes gothic mountain atmosphere, adventure, and physical peril.