Read "Captain Shannon" by Coulson Kernahan online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
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.