stitutions, 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.
In such a mood Olga became a docile and purring tiger kitten, only one never quite forgot her claws. She was highly superstitious, Seagraves discovered; but then her whole character was so anomalous and so replete with unexpectedly outcropping traits and wildly illogical beliefs that it was almost to be expected she would believe in ghosts.
She clung tenaciously to the belief, so Brandon told Seagraves, that some day Paul would return and end the life of the man who—the Terrorist had told his sister shortly before his death—had done him to death.
"Do you still believe, Olga, that Paul is going to come back one day and carry Brandon away with him into the Unknown?" asked Seagraves.
Olga's dark eyes grew suddenly darker as she slowly removed a cigarette from between her too red lips.
"Not only is he coming," she answered, 'but he is coming soon. Only night before last I talk with him. I tell him hurry. You see his spirit cannot rest until his murder is—ah, my very bad English!—avenge'."
"You're a very foolish woman, Olga," admonished Seagraves. "If you refuse to listen to my warning, you're going to find yourself in lots of trouble. I want you to understand that."
Then the drowsing tigress put out her claws.
"You threaten me!" she fairly hissed, tossing away her cigarette and rising. "I am a free woman. You are, after all, like my own people. You would make slaves of all who cannot buy their freedom of—of thought and action."
She glanced about queerly before she concluded:
"Don't interest yourself too far. You may be great, but remember—I am no longer to be despised. You have waited too long. Should I choose, for example, I could have shot you where you sit."
Joe Seagraves leaped out of his chair, an automatic in his experienced hand and menacing the mysterious woman steadily.
But already the allegorical vampire,
