Beadle's New Dime Novels: Blue Dick

Blue Dick; or, The Yellow Chief's Vengeance by Captain Mayne Reid

This romance of the Rocky Mountains follows the aftermath of a brutal plantation punishment. On Squire Blackadder's Mississippi cotton plantation near Vicksburg, young Blount Blackadder orders "Blue Dick," a mulatto slave, subjected to the "punishment of the pump"—a torture involving a continuous stream of cold water directed at the victim's skull—as revenge for the youth's romantic rival claim on Sylvia, a quadroon girl who has yielded to the planter's son's power instead. Blue Dick endures the agony without crying out, his defiant gaze met with Sylvia's presence among the spectators. Three days after his release, Sylvia is found murdered in the peach orchard, her skull cleaved by an axe, and Blue Dick has vanished. A search with bloodhounds ensues but fails to capture the suspected mulatto murderer. The narrative context notes the harsher conditions of slavery on Mississippi's great cotton and tobacco plantations compared to older eastern territories.