Captain Shannon
CHAPTER I
WHO IS “CAPTAIN SHANNON”?
The year 18— will be memorable for the perpetration in England and in Ireland of a series of infamously diabolical outrages. On the scene of each crime was found—sometimes scrawled in plain rough capitals upon a piece of paper which was pinned to the body of a victim, sometimes rudely chalked in the same lettering upon a door or wall—this inscription—“By order.—Captain Shannon.”
Who Captain Shannon was the police failed entirely to discover, although the counties in which the crimes occurred were scoured from end to end, and every person who was known to have been in the neighbourhood was subjected to the severest examination. That some who were so examined knew more than they would tell, there was reason to believe; but so dreaded was the miscreant’s name, and so swift and terrible had been the fate of those who in the past had incurred his vengeance, that neither offers of reward nor threats of punishment could elicit anything but dogged denials.
But when the conspirators carried the war into the enemy’s country, and successfully accomplished the peculiarly daring crime which wrecked the police headquarters at New Scotland Yard, the indignation of the public knew no bounds. If the emissaries of Captain Shannon could succeed in conveying an infernal machine into New Scotland Yard itself, the whole community was—so it was argued—at the mercy of a band of murderers.
The scene in the House of Commons on the night following the outrage was one of great excitement. The Chief Secretary for Ireland declared, in a memorable speech, that the purpose of the crime was to terrorise and to intimidate. No loyal English or Irish citizen would, he was sure, be deterred from doing his duty by such infamous acts; but that they had to deal with murderers of the most determined type could not be doubted. The whole conspiracy was, in his opinion, the work of some half dozen assassins, who were probably the tools of the monster calling himself “Captain Shannon,” in whose too fertile brain the crimes had, he believed, originated, and under whose devilishly planned directions they had been carried out.
The police had reason to suppose that the headquarters of the conspirators were in Ireland, in which country the majority of the crimes—at all events of the earlier crimes—had been committed.
He regretted to say, but it was his duty to say, that but for the disloyal attitude of a section of the Irish people—who, from dastardly and contemptible cowardice, or from sympathy with the assassins, had not only withheld the evidence, without which it was impossible to trace the various outrages to their cause, but had on more than one occasion actually sought to hinder the police in the execution of their duty—the conspirators would long since have been brought to book.
The Secretary then went on to denounce in the strongest language what he called the infamous conduct of the disloyal Irish. He declared, amid ringing cheers, that the man or woman who sought to shield such a monster as Captain Shannon, or to protect him and his confederates from justice, was nothing less than a murderer in the eyes of God and of man. He informed the House that although the Government had actually framed several important measures which would go far to remove the grievances of which Irishmen were complaining, he for one would, in view of what had taken place, strenuously oppose the consideration at that moment of any measures which had even the appearance of a concession to Irish demands. It was repression, not concession, which must be meted out to traitors and murderers.
Within a month after the delivery of this speech all England was horrified by the news of a crime more wantonly wicked than any outrage which had preceded it, a crime which resulted—as its perpetrators must have known it would result—in the wholesale murder of hundreds of inoffensive people against whom—excepting for the fact that they happened to be law-abiding citizens—the followers of Captain Shannon could have no grievance.