Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/46

1124 cleared, and behind it three men sat in a row. Two of these were the strangers who had come with Trant, and the cases they had carried, together with the one Trant himself had brought, stood open under the table. The man who sat between these two was Meyan. Near the table stood Miss Silber.

At sight of her, Winton Edwards made one swift step forward before he Recollected the promise he had made, and checked himself. Eva Silber had grown pale as death. She stood now with small hands clenched tight against her breast, staring into the face of the young American she loved. Trant closed the door and locked it.

E can begin now, I think,” he said.

He stooped at once over the instrument eases and brought out from them three folding screens, about eighteen inches square when extended, which he set on the table—one in front of each of the three men. At the bottom of each screen was a circular hole just large enough for a man's arm to go through; and at Trant's command the men put their arms through them. Stooping again swiftly over the instrument cases, Trant took out three sphygmographs.

He rapidly adjusted these on the arms of the three men, and set in motion the revolving drums, against which the pencil points traced their wavy fines on smoked paper. His clients, leaning forward in their interest, could then understand the purpose of the screens, which were designed to hide the pitilessly exact records from the three men.

For several moments Trant allowed the instruments to run quietly, until the men had recovered from the nervousness caused by the beginning of the test.

“I am going to ask Miss Silber to tell you now, as briefly as she can,” he said, after a pause, evenly and steadily, “the circumstances of her father's connection with the Russian revolution which brought him to the state you have seen, and the reasons why she has left you to go with this man to Russia.”

“To Russia?” broke from Winton Edwards.

“To Russia, yes !” The girl's pale cheeks glowed. “You have seen my father, what he is, what they have made of him, and you did not know he was a Russian? You have seen him as he is! Let me tell you—you, who wear proudly the badge of your revolution fought in seven short years by your great-grandfathers—what my father was!

“Before I was born—it was in the year 1887— my father was a student in Moscow. He had already married my mother the year before. The Czar, finding even the teachings he had been advised to permit made people dangerous, closed the universities. Father and his fellow students protested. They were imprisoned; and they kept my father, who had led the protest, so long that I was three years old before he saw his home again!

“But suffering and prison could not frighten him! In Zurich, before he went to Moscow, he had been trained for a doctor. And seeing how powerless the protest of the students had been, he determined to go among the people. So he made himself a medical missionary to the poorest, the most oppressed, the most miserable; and wherever he was called to carry a cure for disease, he carried, too, a word of hope, of courage, of protest, a cry for freedom!

“Late one night, in a terrible snowstorm, just twenty years ago, a peasant brought to our door a note, unsigned for the sake of safety, it seemed, telling father that an escaped political prisoner was dying of exposure and starvation in a hut on a deserted farm ten miles from the town. My father hurried to his horse and set out, with food and fagots, and by morning, through the cold and deep snow, he reached the place.

“There he found a man apparently freezing to death, and fed and warmed him; and when the ¡fellow was able to tell his pitiful tale, father boldly encouraged him, told him of the organization of protest he was forming, and asked him to join. Little by little father told him all he had done and all his plans. At nightfall father held out his hand to say farewell, when the other pulled a pistol from his pocket. In the fight that followed, father was able only to wound the other upon the chest with the blunt knife they had used to cut their food, before the spy called a confederate down from the loft, and father was overcome.

“On the information of these police spies, without trial of any sort—father's friends could discover only that the name of his betrayer was Valerian Urth—father was sentenced to solitary confinement in an underground cell for life! And my mother— because she sent food and fagots to a supposed convict—was exiled to Siberia! Ten years ago, her sister who took me, received word that she died on the convict island of Sakhalin; but my father—” she gasped for breath—“lived, at least!”

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Trant, who had stooped swiftly to watch his records more closely when the name of the police spy was mentioned, still kept his gaze steadfastly upon his instruments. Suddenly he motioned to the girl to complete her narrative.

“Five years ago, when I was eighteen, I left my mother's sister and went back to my father's friends, such of them as were still free,” she continued. “Many who had worked with him for the organization, had been caught or betrayed. But others and more had come in their places; and they had work for me. I might move about with less suspicion than a man. So I helped prepare for the strikes of 1905, which at last so terrified the Czar that on the 30th of October he issued his manifesto to free those in prison. I had helped to free my father with the rest. I took him to Hungary and left him with friends while I came here. Now, do you not understand why I am going back?” she turned in pitiful appeal to young Edwards. “It is because there is work again in Russia for me to do! The Russian government is taking vengeance today for the amnesty of 1905 which freed my father!”

HE checked herself again and turned to Trant to see if he would force her still to proceed. But he was facing intently, as if fascinated, the strange