Penny Blood Serial Cover — page 124: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

116 ALFRED DE ROSANN. For some time Edouard clung with agonizing te- nacity to the arm of the Commissary; but the agita- tion of the crowd, the frequent shocks each individual experienced, and the force of those: often-repeated concussions, occasioned by the oscillating movements of the entire mass which no one in particular seemed to direct, but of which every soul was an assistant spring to sustain an unwearied motion, soon separated the wretched young man from the side of his protector, and he shortly found himself in the midst of those convicts who had commenced the riot, and who were the most inveterately disposed against him. A yell of satisfaction, which one might fancy to resemble the deadly whoop of Indians dancing round the fire whereat their prisoners are cooking for the repast of those savage anthropophagi, arose amongst the convicts when Edouard was thus thrown into their power; and a dismal, loud, long shriek issued from the lips of the wretched being, who but too well divined the horri- ble fate that was in reserve for him. While the victim was thus secured to those who thirsted for his blood in the centre of the mutinous body, the convicts on the outside had to contend against the attacks of the soldiery. No muskets were discharged; but the bayonet was a powerful reasoner to compel the refractory to a surrender; and as the circumference of the crowd of insurgents gradually became lessened, order would have been soon re- established through the efforts of the military, unac- customed as those brave warriors were to a warfare where they were obliged to abstain from rigorous measures as much as possible, had not the terrible screams of Edouard for a moment suspended all opera- tions, and reduce both soldiers and galley-slaves to silence and transitory inactivity on the extremities of the mass of people thus condensed together, while a terrible massacre was being perpetrated in the middle, whither no bayonets had as yet forced an entrance. The infuriated convicts of the centre seized hold of Edouard, and tossed him from one to the other, like a frail vessel hurled from billow to hillow et. the mere >