Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/47

Rh “hammering man” and his two stranger companions; yet he was not watching their faces or their figures at all. His eyes followed the little stylus points which, before each of the three, continually traced their lines of record. Then he took quickly from his pocket a folded paper, yellow with age, worn, creased, and pierced with pin marks. In the sight of all he unfolded it swiftly upon the table before the three, refolded it, and put it back into his pocket. And though at sight of it no face changed among the three, even Trant's clients could see how one line now suddenly grew flat, with low elevations, irregular and f a r apart, as the pencil point seemed almost to stop its motion over the smoked paper of the man in the middle, Meyan.

“That is all,” said Trant, in a tone of assured triumph, as he unstrapped the sphygmographs from their wrists. “You can speak now, Mr. Edwards.”

“Eva!” cried Winton Edwards, in wild appeal. “You are not married to this man?”

“Married? No!” the girl exclaimed in horror. “Until last Thursday, when he came to the office, I never saw him! But he has come to call me for the cause which must be to me higher and holier than love! I must leave my love for the cause of the Russian revolution!”

“‘I n the cause of the revolution’! So!” Meyan now, with a heavy slouch of his muscular body, left his two companions at the table and moved up beside the girl. “Have any more of you anything to say to her before she goes back with me to Russia?”

“To her?—no!” Trant replied. “But to you—and to these gentlemen,” he motioned to the two who had sat at the table with Meyan, “I have to announce the result of my test, for which they are waiting. This elder gentleman is Ivan Munikov, who was forced to leave Russia eight years ago because his pamphlet on ‘Inalienable Rights’ had incurred the displeasure of the police. This younger man is Dmitri Vasili, who was exiled to Siberia for political offenses at thirteen years of age, but escaped to America. They both are members of the Russian revolutionary organization in Chicago.”

“But the test—the test!” cried Vasili.

“The test,” the psychologist turned sternly to face Meyan, “has shown as conclusively and irrefutably as I could hope that this man is not the revolutionist he claims to be, but is, as we suspected might be the case, an agent of the Russian secret police. And not only that! It has shown just as truly, though this fact was at first wholly unsuspected by me, that he—this agent of police who would have betrayed the daughter now and taken her back to Russia to be punished for her share in the agitation of 1905 —is the same agent, who twenty years ago, betrayed the father, Herman Silber, into imprisonment! True name from false I do not know; but this man, who calls himself Meyan now, called himself then, Valerian Urth!”

“Valerian Urth!” Eva Silber cried, staggering back into Winton Edwards' arms.

But Meyan made a disdainful gesture with his huge, f a t hands. “Bah! you would try to prove such things by your foolish test?”

“Then you will not refuse, of course,” Trant demanded, sternly, “to show us if there is a knifescar on your chest?”

Even as Meyan would have repeated his denial, Vasili and Munikov leaped from the rear of the room and tore his shirt from his breast. The psychologist rubbed and beat the skin, and the blood rose to the surface, revealing the thin line of an almost invisible and time-effaced scar.

“Our case is proved, I think!” The psychologist turned from the two who stared with eyes hot with hate at the cringing spy, and again faced his clients.

He unlocked the door, and handed the key to Munikov; then, picking up his instrument cases and record sheets, with Miss Silber and his clients he left the room and entered the landlady's sitting room.

HEN I received Mr. Edwards' letter this morning,” Trant said in answer to the questions that showered upon him, “it was clear to me at once that the advertisement he inclosed depended for its appeal on reminding Eva Silber of some event of prime importance to herself, but also, from the wording employed, of popular or national significance as well. You further told me that October 30th was a special holiday with Miss Silber. That, I found, to be the date of the Czar's manifesto of freedom and declaration of amnesty to political prisoners. At once it flashed upon me!

“Eva Silber was a Russian. The difference between the 17th given in the advertisements and the 30th—thirteen days—is just the present difference between the old-style calendar used in Russia and ours.

“Before going to the Crerar Library, then, it was clear that we had to do with a Russian revolutionary intrigue. At the library I obtained the key to the cipher and translated the advertisement, obtaining the name of Meyan and his address, and also the name and address of Dmitri Vasili, a well-known pro-revolutionary writer. To my surprise, Vasili knew nothing of any revolutionist named Meyan. It was inconceivable that a revolutionary emissary should come to Chicago and he not know of it. It became necessary to find Meyan immediately.