“I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests.... And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——”
She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment’s thought lost in tragic retrospection.
“Kai!” she whispered dreamily as though to herself—“what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.”
Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves’s breathing seemed almost painful to him so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton’s hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.
Tressa Norne’s strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.
“I think that there is nothing more for me to add,” she said. “The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.
“Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.
“But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy.... They will surely attempt to kill me.... I don’t believe I can avoid—death—very long.... But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.”
“They’ll have to get me first,” said Cleves, bluntly. “I shall not permit you out of my sight.”
Recklow said in a musing voice: “And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.”