Upon questioning, the banker proudly asserted that his son had only the day before returned from a successful adventure in the Black Hills, and had, as a matter of fact, found a gold mine, which he had sold for the very bricks making up the exhibit. Gently the agent disabused the banker of this sad misapprehension, and, enlisting the aid of the local Sheriff, had the prodigal son arrested. The unfortunate conclusion to this tale of detective expertness is that although the gold was eventually returned to the Homestake, the young bandit escaped from the train which was carrying him back to Cheyenne, and was never thereafter apprehended. As for the other four robbers and the rest of the treasure, no further trace of either was ever discovered. Although banditry and skulduggery played a very great part in the tales of most of the other bonanza gold fields, the Black Hills story was for the most part happily without extraordinary violence. Much more conspicuous in the history of the Hills than the desperate adventures of bandits are the exploits of the folk heroes who rode the Deadwood legend into immortality. Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Deadwood Dick, Preacher Smith, all of these amazing personalities achieved a lasting fame during the early days of this later frontier, not for any deeds of derring-do in the Sam Bass fashion, but for the old American custom of living and dying in a high and wide manner. In all probability Deadwood Dick has carried the saga of the Hills farther and to a greater audience, both in this country and abroad, than any of the others, and for that reason, as well as for the strange circumstance that he never existed, it is perhaps well to tell his story first. Dick, who never had a last name, was nothing more nor less than the happy creation of an overworked literary side-liner eking out a living in the late seventies. Having exhausted the possible plot complexities of such heroes as Seth Jones and Duke Darrall, Messrs. Beadle and Adams, proprietors of that stupendous literary zoo, The Pocket Library (published weekly at 98 William Street, New York, price five cents), urged their hack, Edward L. Wheeler, to crank out a new character. This Shakespeare of the sensational, having recently heard of the brave doings in Deadwood, of the Black Hills, promptly created a latter-day Leatherstocking, Deadwood Dick.