Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/327

Rh "Of what?"

"Of being implicated in the coming revolution in Russia? Remember I am the Red Priest. Have you never heard of me? My name is Otto Kampf."

Otto Kampf!

I stood before him open-mouthed. Who in Russia had not heard of that mysterious unknown person who had directed a hundred conspiracies against the Imperial Autocrat, and yet the identity of whom the police had always failed to discover. It was believed that Kampf had once been professor of chemistry at Moscow University, and that he had invented that most terrible and destructive explosive used by the revolutionists. The ingredients of the powerful compound and the mode of firing it was the secret of the Nihilists alone — and Otto Kampf, the mysterious leader, whose personality was unknown even to the conspirators themselves, directed those constant attempts which held the Emperor and his Government in such hourly terror.

Rewards without number had been issued by the Ministry of the Interior for the betrayal and arrest of the unseen man whose power in Russia, permeating every class, was greater than that of the Emperor himself — at whose word one day the people would rise in a body and destroy their oppressors.

The Emperor, the ministers, the police and the bureaucrats knew this, yet they were powerless — they knew that the mysterious professor who had disappeared from Moscow fifteen years before and had never since been seen was only waiting his opportunity to strike a blow that would stagger