Beadle's Pocket Novels No. 68: Iron Hand, the Tory Chief

About this issue

"Iron Hand, Chief of the Tory League," serialized in Beadle and Adams's dime novel (February 8, 1877), follows Edgar Sherwood, an English captain in the Continental Army during 1778 near Lake George. After his betrothed Imogene's father Thomas Lear—a Tory—forbids their marriage when Edgar joins the Patriot cause, they arrange a secret meeting. Edgar confesses a troubling dream in which his doppelgänger appears at a lakeside with Imogene drowning. That night, leading a company to protect a prominent Whig's house from attack by the Tory League—a band of Loyalists and Native Americans led by the notorious "Iron Hand"—Sherwood discovers the Whig murdered, scalped, and mutilated on his floor, mourned by a Newfoundland dog. The narrative interweaves romance, Revolutionary War conflict, and frontier violence, with supernatural premonitions foreshadowing danger.