CAPTAIN SHANNON
CAPTAIN SHANNON
BY
COULSON KERNAHAN
AUTHOR OF “A DEAD MAN’S DIARY,” “A BOOK OF STRANGE SINS,”
“SORROW AND SONG,” “GOD AND THE ANT,” ETC.
[Illustration: [Publisher’s logo]]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1896
_Copyright, 1896_,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WHO IS “CAPTAIN SHANNON”? 1
II CAPTAIN SHANNON’S MANIFESTO 9
III THE “DAILY RECORD” TO THE RESCUE 20
IV THE MURDER IN FLEET STREET 25
V THE IDENTITY OF CAPTAIN SHANNON DISCLOSED AT LAST 34
VI I MAKE UP MY MIND TO FIND CAPTAIN SHANNON 44
VII MY FIRST MEETING WITH JAMES MULLEN 52
VIII THE DYNAMITE HULK 66
IX I TAKE UP MY QUARTERS AT CANVEY 74
X I BOARD THE “CUBAN QUEEN” 81
XI PERSONAL EXPLANATIONS 94
XII HOW CAPTAIN SHANNON’S AUTOGRAPH CAME INTO MY POSSESSION 101
XIII I POSSESS MYSELF OF THE SECRET OF JAMES BAKEWELL GREEN 113
XIV ONE OF THE DOCUMENTS WHICH COST MY INQUIRY AGENT HIS LIFE 120
XV A DOCUMENT OF IMPORTANCE 127
XVI HENRY JEANES, ALIAS JAMES MULLEN 136
XVII ON THE HEELS OF JAMES MULLEN 142
XVIII I BECOME A HAIRDRESSER’S ASSISTANT 160
XIX “ARE THERE ANY LETTERS FOR HENRY JEANES, PLEASE?” 166
XX HOW JAMES MULLEN AND MYSELF ALMOST MET 171
XXI HOW I STRUCK JAMES MULLEN’S TRACK 180
XXII THE ARTFULNESS OF JAMES MULLEN 193
XXIII HOW I GOT WEDGED IN A WINDOW, AND LEFT BEHIND 200
XXIV A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH! 213
XXV JAMES MULLEN AND I MEET AT LAST 219
XXVI AFTER THE EXPLOSION 226
XXVII I PLAY A GAME OF “BLUFF” WITH HUGHES 241
XXVIII I BOARD THE “CUBAN QUEEN” FOR THE SECOND TIME 254
XXIX I TRY A FALL WITH JAMES MULLEN 259
XXX MORE DEVILRY 274
XXXI THE ARREST OF CAPTAIN SHANNON 281
Captain Shannon
CHAPTER I
WHO IS “CAPTAIN SHANNON”?
The year 18-- will be memorable for the perpetration in England and in
Ireland of a series of infamously diabolical outrages. On the scene of
each crime was found--sometimes scrawled in plain rough capitals upon
a piece of paper which was pinned to the body of a victim, sometimes
rudely chalked in the same lettering upon a door or wall--this
inscription--“By order.--Captain Shannon.”
Who Captain Shannon was the police failed entirely to discover,
although the counties in which the crimes occurred were scoured
from end to end, and every person who was known to have been in the
neighbourhood was subjected to the severest examination. That some who
were so examined knew more than they would tell, there was reason to
believe; but so dreaded was the miscreant’s name, and so swift and
terrible had been the fate of those who in the past had incurred his
vengeance, that neither offers of reward nor threats of punishment
could elicit anything but dogged denials.
But when the conspirators carried the war into the enemy’s country, and
successfully accomplished the peculiarly daring crime which wrecked the
police headquarters at New Scotland Yard, the indignation of the public
knew no bounds. If the emissaries of Captain Shannon could succeed in
conveying an infernal machine into New Scotland Yard itself, the whole
community was--so it was argued--at the mercy of a band of murderers.
The scene in the House of Commons on the night following the outrage
was one of great excitement. The Chief Secretary for Ireland declared,
in a memorable speech, that the purpose of the crime was to terrorise
and to intimidate. No loyal English or Irish citizen would, he was
sure, be deterred from doing his duty by such infamous acts; but that
they had to deal with murderers of the most determined type could not
be doubted. The whole conspiracy was, in his opinion, the work of
some half dozen assassins, who were probably the tools of the monster
calling himself “Captain Shannon,” in whose too fertile brain the
crimes had, he believed, originated, and under whose devilishly planned
directions they had been carried out.
The police had reason to suppose that the headquarters of the
conspirators were in Ireland, in which country the majority of the
crimes--at all events of the earlier crimes--had been committed.
He regretted to say, but it was his duty to say, that but for the
disloyal attitude of a section of the Irish people--who, from dastardly
and contemptible cowardice, or from sympathy with the assassins, had
not only withheld the evidence, without which it was impossible to
trace the various outrages to their cause, but had on more than one
occasion actually sought to hinder the police in the execution of their
duty--the conspirators would long since have been brought to book.
The Secretary then went on to denounce in the strongest language what
he called the infamous conduct of the disloyal Irish. He declared,
amid ringing cheers, that the man or woman who sought to shield such
a monster as Captain Shannon, or to protect him and his confederates
from justice, was nothing less than a murderer in the eyes of God and
of man. He informed the House that although the Government had actually
framed several important measures which would go far to remove the
grievances of which Irishmen were complaining, he for one would, in
view of what had taken place, strenuously oppose the consideration
at that moment of any measures which had even the appearance of a
concession to Irish demands. It was repression, not concession, which
must be meted out to traitors and murderers.
Within a month after the delivery of this speech all England was
horrified by the news of a crime more wantonly wicked than any outrage
which had preceded it, a crime which resulted--as its perpetrators
must have known it would result--in the wholesale murder of hundreds
of inoffensive people against whom--excepting for the fact that they
happened to be law-abiding citizens--the followers of Captain Shannon
could have no grievance.
All that was known was that a respectably dressed young man, carrying
what appeared to be about a dozen well-worn volumes from Mudie’s,
or some other circulating library, had entered an empty first-class
carriage at Aldgate station. These books were held together by a
strap--as is usual when sending or taking volumes for exchange to
the libraries--and it had occurred to no one to ask to examine them,
although the officials at all railway stations had, in view of the
recent outrages, been instructed to challenge every passenger carrying
a suspicious-looking parcel.
The theory which was afterwards put forward was that what appeared to
be a parcel of volumes from a circulating library was in reality a
case cunningly covered with the backs, bindings, and edges of books,
and that this case contained an infernal machine of the most deadly
description. It was supposed that the wretch in charge of it had
purposely entered an empty carriage that he might the better carry out
his infamous plan, and that after setting fire to the fuse he had left
the train at the next station.
That this theory afforded the most likely explanation of what
subsequently took place was generally agreed, although one well-known
authority on explosives expressed himself as of opinion that no
infernal machine capable of causing what had happened could be
concealed in so small a compass as that suggested. But it was pointed
out in reply that from arrests and discoveries which had been made in
America and on the Continent, it was evident that the manufacture of
infernal machines and investigations into the qualities of explosives
were being scientifically and systematically carried on.
Though no connection had as yet been traced between the persons who
had been arrested and the perpetrators of the recent outrages, the
probabilities were that such connection existed, and it was asked
whether it might not be possible that some one who was thus engaged in
experimenting with explosives had discovered a new explosive, or a new
combination of explosives, which was different from and more deadly
than anything known to the authorities.
Into the probability or improbability of this and other theories which
were put forward it would be idle here to enter. All that is known is
that the train had only just entered the tunnel immediately to the west
of Blackfriars station when there occurred the most awful explosion
of the sort within the memory of man. The passengers, as well as the
guard, driver, and stoker, not only of the train in which the explosion
took place, but also of a train which was proceeding in the opposite
direction and happened to be passing at the time, were killed to a man,
and with the exception of one of Smith’s bookstall boys, whose escape
seemed almost miraculous, every soul in the station--ticket-collectors,
porters, station-master, and the unfortunate people who were waiting on
the platform--shared the same fate.
Nor was this all, for at the moment when the outrage occurred the train
was passing under one of the busiest crossings in London--that where
New Bridge Street, Blackfriars Bridge, Queen Victoria Street, and the
Thames Embankment converge--and so terrific was the explosion that the
space between these converging thoroughfares was blown away as a man’s
hand is blown away by the bursting of a gun.
The buildings in the immediate neighbourhood, including parts of St.
Paul’s station on the London, Chatham, and Dover railway, the offices
over Blackfriars station, and De Keyser’s Hotel on the opposite side of
the way, were wrecked, and the long arm of Blackfriars Bridge lay idle
across the river like a limb which has been rudely hacked from a body.
But it is not my intention to attempt any realistic description of
the scene, or of the awful sights which were witnessed when, after
the first paralysing moment of panic was over, the search for the
injured, the dying, and the dead was commenced. The number of lives
lost, including those who perished in Blackfriars station, in the
two trains, in the street, and in the surrounding buildings, was
enormous. Several columns of the papers next morning were filled
with lists of the missing and the dead. One name on the list had a
terrible significance. It was the name of the man to achieve whose
murder the lives of so many innocent men and women had been ruthlessly
sacrificed; the name of a man whose remains were never found, but whose
funeral pyre was built of the broken bodies of hundreds of his fellow
creatures,--the name of the Chief Secretary for Ireland.