d not be with them in person, but was
always there in spirit--if they were to believe his most zealous
utterances. The Iron Count Marlanx, professed hater of all that was rich
and noble, was the power behind the Committee of Ten. The assassination
of the little Prince and the overthrow of the royal family awaited his
pleasure: he was the man who would give the word.

Not until he was ready could anything be done, for Marlanx had promised
to put the Committee of Ten in control of this pioneer community when it
came under the dominion of anarchists.

Alas, for the Committee of Ten! The wiliest fox in the history of the
world was never so wily as the Iron Count. Some day they were to find
out that he was using them to pull his choicest chestnuts from the fire.

The Committee was seated around the long table in the stifling,
breathless room, the armourer at the head. Those who came by way of the
sewer had performed ablutions in the queer toilet room that once had
been a secret vault for the storing of feudal plunder. What air there
was came from the narrow ventilator that burrowed its ways up to the
shop of William Spantz, or through the chimney-hole in the ceiling.
Olga Platanova sat far down the side, a moody, inscrutable expression in
her dark eyes. She sat silent and oppressed through all the acrid,
bitter discussions which carried the conclave far past the midnight
hour. In her heart she knew that these men and women were already
thinking of her as a regicide. It was settled--it was ordained. At
Spantz's right lounged Peter Brutus, a lawyer--formerly secretary to the
Iron Count and now his sole representative among these people. He was a
dark-faced, snaky-eyed young man, with a mop of coarse black hair that
hung ominously low over his high, receding forehead. This man was the
chosen villain among all the henchmen who came at the beck and call of
the Iron Count.

Julius Spantz, the armourer's son, a placid young man of goodly physical
proportions, sat next to Brutus, while down the table ranged others deep
in the consideration of the world's gravest problems. One of the women
was Madame Drovnask, whose husband had been sent to Siberia for life;
and the other, Anna Cromer, a rabid Red lecturer, who had been driven
from the United States, together with her amiable husband: an assassin
of some distinction and many aliases, at present foreman in charge of
one of the bridge-building crews on the new railroad.

Every man