Penny Dreadfuls, 1916 · page 400 of 400
Tom Anderson, Dare-Devil: A Young Virginian in the Revolution — page 400: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page from Tom Anderson, Dare-Devil This is a page of running prose (page 378) from a Victorian penny dreadful titled *Tom Anderson, Dare-Devil*. The text describes violent action: a character named Billy shoots a man, then hides in a boot-closet and is discovered and ejected from a house. The narrative follows the character's subsequent movements through the night and into the following day, as he hides in the woods near Carter's Mountain, apparently evading pursuit for shooting Captain Leslie. The dialect-heavy prose depicts the character's hunger, recovery from injury, and interaction with an agitated catbird.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
378 Tom ANDERSON, DarRE-DEVIL about the hall table. Leslie’s blazing blue eyes followed the girl’s flying figure. He heeded Billy no more than if he’d been the pointer. Billy tugged at the trigger. While the house shook to the drop of a man’s body, Billy’s instinctive cunning befriended him. He let fall the weapon; crawled like a lizard for a few feet, keeping against the wainscot, and when candles were brought, the search begun, the goblin was found snoring in the boot-closet under the stairs, his thumb in his mouth. A spurred heel raked his shins. “Wake up, you devil’s imp! Get out with you.” “Want some br-e-a-d,” wailed the Fool. Angered by his noise, a sergeant seized the “object” by his handy wool and set him out of doors. Writhing with pain, he staggered away, filling the night with his cries. All this happened about dusk. From midnight till daylight his movements were like a snake’s for secrecy. To this day no one knows where he was, or what he did. He was as full of fatality as a rattlesnake. Purpose, even in the poor brain of a Fool, had “worked.” While a furious search was going on for the assailant of Captain Leslie, the overseer’s wife, cowering behind the barred door of the Egger cabin, was frightened by a muffled knock. Came a whisper in her ear, through a crevice in the logs: — ‘“Neenter wait fer him. He’s whur he'll never git out! No mo’!” At daylight he let himself into a spring-house, and filled himself with cream. By sunrise he was on Carter’s Mountain. He slept on the warm pine-needles until noon. When he waked, the pain in his neck was gone. He lay blinking at the sun comfortably, until the scoldings of a catbird roused him. The bird had a nest in the thicket close by, and she was harassed. “Wunner whut ail her?’’ Cautiously he pushed through the dense growth of sassafras and huckleberry bushes. ‘“Ainh no snake roun’ hyur, nowhurs. Whut de matter wid her?” ‘The catbird’s excitement was a danger-signal. ECONMMICOOOKSa(6© m