BILLY STEELE: KID RANGER--THE DARK SKULL'S REVENGE

Billy could battle the West’s worst outlaws, but he suddenly shivered in his boots when a girl asked him to trip the light fantastic.

Once the dance ended, Miss Cartright invited Billy and the Col. to share her picnic lunch. Somehow, she learned from Billy that the Col. had a particular fondness for fried chicken and home made dumplings.

While Paradise Valley was caught up in the warmth of the day, soon, a cold-blooded killer entered the town. The smoke from the Sidewinder’s dangling cigarette swirled like a snake in the towns’ cheerily decorated square. The smoke’s stench polluted the aroma of Paradise Valley’s picnic table. Slowly dismounting his horse, the Sidewinder spotted Billy in the crowd. As Billy ran ahead to get the Col.’s horse, the Sidewinder, with a malevolent smile ran up to Billy and pushed the kid ranger into a water trough. Wet and humiliated in front of the entire town, Billy slowly lifted himself from the trough and was ready to answer his smirking challenger.

"Sorry, squirt, I didn’t see you," the Sidewinder said with a feigned sincerity as he placed his hat brim over his eyes to avoid recognition by any lawmen. But the force of his shove led Billy to believe the confrontation was deliberate and vengeful.

The Sidewinder looked long and angrily at Billy; he seemed to execute the kid ranger with his looks. The young outlaw had to restrain his fingers from drawing his Colt 45. Billy, likewise, gave a piercing stare to this dangerous stranger. The Sidewinder intuitively knew he had found his victim. Col. Tim and Miss Cartright soon helped Billy up from the trough. Fearing he would be recognized from his wanted posters, the Sidewinder galloped his midnight steed out of Paradise Valley, satisfied that his gamble paid off. He risked capture in order to positively identify the boy he must murder, for the Sidewinder swore to exact revenge on the boy who killed his father-The Dark Skull.

In an unholy, torch lit cave near Paradise Valley, The Sidewinder, despite his tender years, rallied grisly, gun-toting outlaws who were twice his age and then some, to join his malevolent crusade. Just as The Dark Skull and The Trinity Of Terror recruited The Legion Of The Lawless, The Sidewinder’s fiery voice and swagger soon inflamed the "owl hoots" who once swore allegiance to The Sidewinder’s adopted father.

In his plan to destroy Billy Steele, his Holt’s Rangers family and to pillage and plunder the American frontier, The Sidewinder detailed his adoration for his adopted father, Lester, Fort Yuma’s oafish cook whose alter ego was The Dark Skull, the West’s worst enemy and murderer of Billy’s birth parents.

In his mind and heart, The Sidewinder knew The Dark Skull not as a criminal, but as the man who rescued him as an infant from a burning wagon some ten years ago. As cruel as Lester’s evil alter ego was to the outside world, to the tiny baby, he was a loving and doting father. The young Sidewinder held back the tears as he remembered the day he found the charred body of Lester, killed by Billy Steele. As a tear flowed down The Sidewinder’s eye, it soon reached his trigger finger and the adolescent’s hand gripped mightily his gun handle. As the 13-year old Sidewinder buried his adopted father, the youth swore on Lester’s unmarked grave he would be avenged. The Sidewinder used his bare hands to dig his father’s final resting place. And the adolescent vowed ten bullets in Billy’s body for every pile of dirt he placed on Lester’s corpse.

While The Dark Skull raised his adopted son, Lester had told the young Sidewinder-to-be how he saved him when Indians attacked his parent’s wagon and killed them.