successful career.

It was at this time that my father disappeared. His letters, which had
come to me regularly, ceased. He no longer appeared at our Pell Street
quarters. Our comrades sought him everywhere. Through our secret service
we ransacked every prison in the land. But he was lost as completely as
if the earth had swallowed him up, and to this day no clew to his end
has been discovered.*

* Disappearance was one of the horrors of the time. As a
motif, in song and story, it constantly crops up. It was an
inevitable concomitant of the subterranean warfare that
raged through those three centuries. This phenomenon was
almost as common in the oligarch class and the labor castes,
as it was in the ranks of the revolutionists. Without
warning, without trace, men and women, and even children,
disappeared and were seen no more, their end shrouded in
mystery.

Six lonely months I spent in the refuge, but they were not idle months.
Our organization went on apace, and there were mountains of work always
waiting to be done. Ernest and his fellow-leaders, from their prisons,
decided what should be done; and it remained for us on the outside to
do it. There was the organization of the mouth-to-mouth propaganda;
the organization, with all its ramifications, of our spy system; the
establishment of our secret printing-presses; and the establishment of
our underground railways, which meant the knitting together of all our
myriads of places of refuge, and the formation of new refuges where
links were missing in the chains we ran over all the land.