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, which the detective had seen reflected in Olga’s piercing eyes and heard in her studied but crisp and stinging words, had spread its skinny wings and flown. Olga was laughing in such sincere, or well-feigned, mockery at his alarm that the dignified detective momentarily felt abashed.
He put his weapon away, nevertheless, only after a searching glance about the very ordinary little room in which the extraordinary woman had received him. He recalled that the last victim of Olga’s brother, mutilated, headless and repellent, had been found in this same neighborhood, if not in this same house.
“Please--_please_ forgive me,” the strange girl was pleading. “You see, I forgot that you are not like--like Brandon. For him there is no forgiveness. He must perish. But we--you and I--why must we be enemies?”
“There’s but one reason, Olga,” replied Seagraves seriously, “and that is a strong one. It is simply the nature of our respective callings.”
“Then I can only be sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Still, my principles are more--what word?--more sacred than your friendship.”
As the woman paused, Seagraves could have taken an oath that he caught the sound of whispering voices through a door standing slightly ajar not three paces from his elbow. Of a sudden, he stepped forward and flung the door wide with a resounding _bang_.
A gray-walled room, quite empty, was all that rewarded his examination. He turned and found Olga smiling again.
“Did you surprise them?” she inquired sweetly.
“Surprise whom?” demanded the detective.
“The rats,” she said ingenuously, still smiling.
“I’ve seen but one rat here,” murmured Seagraves in an impersonal tone: “I see it now. It has wings that fold up like an umbrella. It is called a vampire.”
Olga smiled on placidly, even after Joe Seagraves had closed the door on her and was gone.
* * * * *
In the language of the man who knotted the noose, Olga, as her kind are certain to do, came at last to the end of her rope.
Conspiracy, blackmail and extortion were at last brought home to her; and it chanced that the same eminent crime expert who had hurried the career of her brother to an inglorious finish was likewise destined to be the instrument of fate in the undoing of Olga.
In time the pursuit narrowed down to the end of a most imperfect day for both quarry and hunters. Then all night, as Brandon and Seagraves gradually drew their web closer and ever closer about the elusive Terrorist, she tricked them at every angle and turn with the cunning of a fox, and it was not until three sleepless days and nights that the two renowned sleuths effected her capture more than five hundred miles distant from the field of her long-continued operations.
“She’ll be as slippery as an eel,” Brandon warned Seagraves, when they were ready to start back with their prisoner. “I’ll never consent to any Pullman for _her_, even though we ignore the law and handcuff her to the seat. One of us is going to have to keep his eyes on her constantly.”
“Only one of us could sleep at a time, anyhow,” said Seagraves; “and surely we can stand it one more night, don’t you think? Suppose we both sit it out with her.”
They at length did decide to “sit it out” with their prisoner, and with that understanding they took her aboard the train.
At the moment of entering the train, a telegram was handed to Brandon, and as soon as the three were comfortably seated in their section the inspector read it with lips compressed and eyes oddly squinted. Then he handed the message to Seagraves, who read:
“Police record Olga Slavsky arrived. Wanted in three countries for complicity in murder nine counts. Escaped Russian Secret Police three times. At present fugitive from justice. Keep close watch on her. Renfrow, Chief Inspector.”
Seagraves returned the telegram to Brandon, winking an eye disparagingly and smiling at what the Chief Inspector had evidently considered a necessary precaution.
The afternoon waned. Early evening found the train three-quarters of an hour behind time. If this kept up they would not arrive before two in the morning.
Olga sat besides Seagraves facing Brandon.
“I would give much for a cigarette,” she announced out of a long silence at ten o’clock, addressing herself to Seagraves.
“This isn’t a smoker,” observed the crime specialist, glancing around, “but there are only two other passengers in the car. Try it.”
He offered her his box, and she took one and lighted it. Filling her lungs with the comforting smoke, she exhaled it in a great cloud and, after a meditative pause, murmured:
“At last I am to see poor Paul.”
She looked Seagraves steadily in the eye and added in a queer tone that she felt her brother was very near tonight.
It was a mixed train, and the day coaches appeared to have much the better of the sleepers as to occupancy. Seagraves noted casually that, besides themselves, their car boasted but two other passengers, and though they might have been snugly asleep in their respective berths, they had apparently elected to sit out the short run, evidently preferring reclining to rising and dressing at 1:30 or 2 o’clock A. M.
“Do you see the man sitting all alone in the last seat with the handkerchief over his face, to keep the light out of his eyes?” Olga’s ruminant voice finally broke in upon the monotonous _clackety-clack_ of wheels upon rail-joints.
“Yes--what about him?” asked Seagraves.
“Nothing, only he--he looks like Paul,” she answered in a guarded voice, as though she feared Brandon, cat-napping now, might overhear her strange language.
“Olga!” ridiculed the detective, “get a grip on yourself.”
Having thus counseled the prisoner, Seagraves was thoughtful for a long space; then he looked over at Olga, saw an odd, uneasy expression on her pretty face and quickly said:
“Here--have another cigarette, Olga. Burn ’em up!”
* * * * *
At midnight the conductor passed through the car.
“We’ll make the city a little before two o’clock,” he said in answer to a sleepy-voiced interrogation from Brandon, who seemed to have banished sleep and was blinking about the car.
“What--we all alone?” he asked Seagraves. Then he caught sight of the two lonely passengers at the far end of the car. “No; two others,” he murmured, answering his own question.
He was turning his gaze away from the man with the handkerchief over his face when something, Seagraves noted, drew his eyes inquiringly back to the sleeper’s hunched figure. The movement caused Seagraves to follow Brandon’s scrutiny. He marked the fact that the handkerchief had fallen from their fellow-passenger’s face, and--was it because of Olga’s suggestion, or was it merely a silly midnight fancy?--he assuredly seemed to trace a certain vague resemblance between the solitary sleeper and the notorious Paul Slavsky, long ago dead.
The idea brought with it a queer, though distinct, sense of unpleasantness. The booming voice of Brandon, breaking in upon his wholly disagreeable train of thought, was highly reassuring.
“Huh!” laughed the Inspector, “I thought I recognized that chap.”
At a quarter to one, Seagraves shook Brandon out of a doze and said, “Keep the lady company for a few minutes. I’m going into the smoker.”
“All right, Joe,” drawled Brandon opening his slightly reddened eyes and seeming to be perfectly wide awake.
Seagraves disappeared into the smoking-room, returning some ten or fifteen minutes later. To his surprise he noted that Brandon, evidently not caring to take a chance on Olga’s diving out of the open window, had handcuffed her fast to the seat and had once more fallen asleep. Olga herself appeared a trifle more cheerful. She even smiled, though somewhat wearily, as Seagraves resumed his seat beside her.
“I told you it would be Paul,” the woman whispered to Seagraves, as though determined to share no part of her secret with the despised Brandon. “See,” she insisted, growing almost jubilant, “it is my brother Paul--come back to me at last!”