Truxton King

So cleverly were all these means of approach concealed and so stealthy the movements of the Committee, that the existence of this underground room, far below the street level, was as yet unsuspected by the police. More than that, the existence of the Committee of Ten as an organisation was unknown to the department, notwithstanding the fact that it had been working quietly, seriously for more than a year.

The Committee of Ten represented the brains and the activity of a rabid coterie in Edelweiss, among themselves styled the Party of Equals. In plain language, they were "Reds." Less than fifty persons in Graustark were affiliated with this particular community of anarchists. For more than a year they had been preparing themselves against the all-important hour for public declaration. Their ranks had been augmented by occasional recruits from other lands; their literature was circulated stealthily; their operations were as secret as the grave, so far as the outside world was concerned. And so the poison sprung up and thrived unhindered in the room below the street, growing in virulence and power under the very noses of the vaunted police of Edelweiss, slowly developing into a power that would some day assert itself with diabolical fury.

There were men and women from Axphain and Dawsbergen in this seed circle that made Edelweiss its spreading ground. They were Reds of the most dangerous type--silent, voiceless, crafty men and women who built well without noise, and who gave out nothing to the world from which they expected to take so much.

The nominal leader was William Spantz, he who had a son in the Prince's household, Julius Spantz, the Master-of-arms. Far off in the hills above the Danube there lived the real leader of this deadly group--the Iron Count Marlanx, exile from the land of his birth, hated and execrated by every loyal Graustarkian, hating and execrating in return with a tenfold greater venom. Marlanx, the man who had been driven from wealth and power by the sharp edict of Prince Robin's mother, the lamented Yetive, in the days of her most glorious reign,--this man, deep in his raging heart, was in complete accord with the desperate band of Reds who preached equality and planned disaster.

Olga Platanova was the latest acquisition to this select circle. A word concerning her: she was the daughter of Professor Platanova, one time oculist and sociologist in a large German University. He had been one of the most brilliant men in Europe and a member of a noble family. There was welcome for him in the homes of the nobility; he hobnobbed, so to speak, with the leading men of time Empire. The Platanova home in Warsaw was one of the most inviting and exclusive in that great, city. The professor's enthusiasm finally carried him from the conservative paths in which he had walked; after he had passed his fiftieth year he became an avowed leader among the anarchists and revolutionists in Poland, his native state. Less than a year before the opening of this tale he was executed for treason and conspiracy against the Empire.