“From the walls of the fair city it shrieked, from the plain it echoed, from the mountain side that low moaning voice rose up to the blue sky, pleading for the doom of the assassin, the death of the tyrant.
“Then it was in times of blood-shed and slaughter, in the day of foul misrule and galling wrong, when the grim bravo whetted his knife on the stones of the altar, and the corses of the murdered crowded the sanctuary of God, then it was, that a few brave and determined men, evoked from the shadows of the past, a Power, mighty yet secret, blasting as the thunder-stroke, yet invisible as the grave!
“The Power of the Steel—winged by the hands of those twin-sisters of vengeance, Secrecy and Mystery.
“Three years past, and on the lips of men, there grew a mighty word—the Steel, the Holy Steel!
“The bravo still smote his victim in the silence of the night, but ere the morrow’s sun, the corse of the assassin lay prostrate beside the murdered.
“The wronger still pursued his work of violence, but it was by stealth and in secrecy; the tyrant still filled the air with shrieks of death and cries of despair, but the trembling tones of his own guilty voice mingled with the last words of the slain.
“The secret band were abroad—the invisible struck their keen dagger suddenly and without mercy, from the cloud that enclosed their existence, and more terrible on the lips of men grew that sound of fear—The vengeance of the Holy Steel.
“Not many days agone, the work which the Order had sworn to fulfill, was hastened by a new crime of the tyrant. The last baron of the race of Albarone, whom the brethren of the steel had resolved to raise to the Ducal throne, awaited within the walls of a dungeon the coming of the morrow, which was to bring to his head the woe and the doom, the axe, the wheel, the scaffold, and the stake. Doomed on a false accusation, doomed on the testimony of forsworn tools of power, Adrian of Albarone had laid him down to die, when the Messenger of the Steel appeared, the rescue was planned, and the morrow morn beheld the prisoner free.
“The march of fate strode swiftly on. All men named our brother—may God receive his soul—as the tool and minion of the Duke, while—it gives me joy to say it—he walked abroad the messenger of the steel.”
“All hail the spirit of Albertine!” arose the solemn exclamation of the brethren—“all hail the incarnate spirit of our order!”