Beadle's Pocket Novels: Mad Anthony's Scouts

About this issue

By Emerson Rodman (Beadle and Adams, 1870) A frontier adventure novella set on the Ohio River. Two wanderers with secret pasts—Hezekiah Smith, a spare New Englander, and Pat Mulroony, a talkative Irishman from Tipperary—meet at a forest camp and decide to travel downriver together. Mistaking a flock of quails for a monster, they spot a flat-boat drifting downstream. After a tense confrontation with its armed operator, they board and meet Luther Waring, a young man engaged to Virginia Lander, daughter of a fellow passenger. Both Lander and his daughter are sheltering in the cabin. Waring explains they're bound for settlements downriver. The narrative emphasizes frontier dialogue, mutual wariness among strangers, and the dangers of the territory.