Penny Dreadfuls, 1916 · page 115 of 400
Tom Anderson, Dare-Devil: A Young Virginian in the Revolution — page 115: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Analysis This is a page of running prose from a Victorian penny dreadful (page 99, titled "Mystery"). The text depicts a violent confrontation in which a man named Tom fights back against a kidnapper who attempts to scalp him. After Tom strikes his attacker, the kidnapper instead cuts off Tom's hair and forces him to undergo a "diabolical transformation"—his clothes are exchanged for rags, and his body and face are dyed with a mixture of barks and ocherous ore. The passage follows Tom's subsequent captivity, where he is chained during the day and kept unchained at night, enduring hunger and deprivation while his captor remains cryptically threatening.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Mystery 99 wound it about his hand. The blade flashed before Tom’s eyes, and he struck out desperately. “Going to scalp me!”’ Rigid and sore as his muscles were, the blow told. His tormentor floundered. Hewas more astonished than he had ever been in his life. Tolerbul ficety, ye air.” “Murder me like a white man! Don’t scalp me!” ‘Don’t aim ter murder ye. Aim ter crop ye.” Panting, Tom kicked the knife toward its owner. He had dropped it when Tom’s fist startled him. The auburn mop was struck off at a stroke. His clothes were exchanged for two ragged garments. Next, the master of ceremonies steeped together some barks, nut-galls, and ocherous ore, and this liquid was poured, in great gourdfuls, over the homespun rags that replaced Tom’s clothes. He was ordered to “dry out”’ before the fire; with the result that the skin on his body was dyed, in no ineffectual way. He was made to stain his face, hands, and ragged hair. The whole diabolical transformation was complete. He was “roped” again; and had the four walls all to himself while the forest rocked and groaned in the blast. At the hour that Dare, in the teeth of the storm, was galloping to the blacksmith’s shop, Tom was summoning his powers of en- durance. While scores dined at Oxheart’s baronial board, he was turning his famished eyes away from some potatoes lying about a clay hearth, spattered with the rain coming down the yawning chimney. At sundown, when the kidnapper reappeared, he said to him: “I hear a squirrel barking. If you’ll lend me that rifle, I’ll shoot it.” “Whut fer?”’ “Because I’m hungry as the devil!” The catamount eyes stared. “Hain’t thur no done taters?”’ pushing them within reach and releasing the boy’s hands. The days wore away into weeks. By day the prisoner was chained in the cabin; by night, “unkenneled.”’ The kidnapper had been brief. “Don’t nuver ondertake ter CORNICLMOOO® SS) (CO) im