rely bound with her face toward a stake, was a young girl--a
maiden of perhaps seventeen summers, whom, at a single glance, one
might surmise was remarkably pretty.

She was stripped to the waist, and upon her snow-white back were
numerous welts from which trickled diminutive rivulets of crimson. Her
head was dropped against the stake to which she was bound, and she was
evidently insensible.

With a cry of astonishment and indignation Fearless Frank leaped
forward to sever her bonds, when like so many grim phantoms there
filed out of the chaparral, and circled around him, a score of
hideously painted savages. One glance at the portly leader satisfied
Frank as to his identity. It was the fiend incarnate--Sitting Bull!

CHAPTER II.

DEADWOOD DICK, THE ROAD-AGENT.

"=$500 Reward:= For the apprehension and arrest of a
notorious young desperado who hails to the name of Deadwood
Dick. His present whereabouts are somewhat contiguous to the
Black Hills. For further information, and so forth, apply
immediately to

HUGH VANSEVERE,

"At Metropolitan Saloon, Deadwood City."

Thus read a notice posted up against a big pine tree, three miles
above Custer City, on the banks of French creek. It was a large
placard tacked up in plain view of all passers-by who took the route
north through Custer gulch in order to reach the infant city of the
Northwest--Deadwood.

Deadwood! the scene of the most astonishing bustle and activity, this
year (1877.) The place where men are literally made rich and poor in
one day and night. Prior to 1877 the Black Hills have been for a
greater part undeveloped, but now, what a change! In Deadwood
districts every foot of available ground has been "claimed" and staked
out; the population has increased from fifteen to more than
twenty-five hundred souls.

The streets are swarming with constantly arriving new-comers; the
stores and saloons are literally crammed at all hours; dance-houses
and can-can dens exist; hundreds of eager, expectant, and hopeful
miners are working in the mines, and the harvest reaped by them is not
at all discouraging. All along the gulch are strung a profusion of
cabins, tents and shanties, making Deadwood in reality a town of a
dozen miles in length, though some enterprising individual has paired
off a couple more infant cities above Deadwood proper, named
respectively Elizabeth City and Ten Strike. The quartz formation in
these n