It took three months of intensive investigation to convince Larry Brandon that Slavsky was all the Secret Police had painted him and more, and that the Terrorist had not emigrated to America with even the remotest intention of reforming. It took the detective three months more to satisfy himself beyond all doubt that Slavsky had, marvelously enough, established an active branch of his old order and was undoubtedly spreading the doctrine of Gorgias and Fichte under the very noses of the Central Office experts. However, the evidence necessary to a conviction was lacking, so nothing could be done.
A little later the men of the same nationality as the Nihilist, whom Brandon had used to great advantage on the case, began, one by one, to drop quietly out of existence. This was not only mysterious—it was uncanny. Finally the decomposed bodies of some of these operatives were found and unmistakably identified.
In each instance the head had been completely severed from the trunk.
Recollecting that the Terrorist order, to which Paul Slavsky had belonged, had signalized its outrages by decapitating its victims, Brandon was enabled to initiate definite plans which, in due course, culminated in his running his man to earth.
But Paul Slavsky never beheld the fatal Chair nor served time. He chose the other route. He had elected to live in rebellion against man’s orderly institutions, and in this same unreasoning revolt he resolved to die. Like most of his ilk, the Terrorist in physical combat was a hard man, and he really fought a great fight, but he fought it with a master craftsman in the conquering of such as he, and inevitably he lost, with many of Larry Brandon’s bullets in his great body and only life enough left in him to greet—and almost at once to take final leave of—his favorite sister, Olga, who had arrived in Europe a little late as it transpired, to join her brother in his sinister calling.
Olga Slavsky, years younger than her lamented brother, was as pretty a little specimen of dark-eyed femininity as ever enchanted fastidious masculine eye. Yet so is the tigress beautiful.
Still, that is not quite the idea I wish to convey. If you can think of a woman in repose being as beautiful as a tigress and, in smoldering hate and loathing as repulsive, as hideous as a preying vampire, then you will get nearer my meaning. Olga, like her brother, was a staunch exponent of the Terrorist doctrine.
What Brandon expected soon came to pass. The strange girl, whom men called beautiful and women envied, was promptly elected to her brother’s place in what was known in the underworld of unlawful secret orders as the “League.” In this way she immediately crossed swords with the man who had ended the career of her brother Paul, and ere long she became aware, through members of the League detailed as spies, that still another noted criminologist, Joe Seagraves, was unpleasantly hot on her trail.
But Olga was undaunted. For daring and ingenuity, she by far eclipsed her cunning and resourceful brother, who had blazed the path of her iconoclastic pilgrimage.
Since little could thus far be proved against Olga, Seagraves believed that it might be better to declare a sort of armistice and, if possible, gradually win her over to the side of law and order. To this end, he openly called and laid his ideas before her. She frankly flouted his implied interest in her well-being, but showed a spirit of compromise by offering the crime specialist a cigarette.