"I have asked you," came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith had
begun to turn the knob), "to reveal to me the name of your
correspondent in Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the
Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but you have declined to confirm me. Yet I know"
(Smith had the door open a good three inches and was peering in) "that
some official, some high official, is a traitor. Am I to resort again
to the question to learn his name?"

Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor's intonation of
the words "the question." This was the Twentieth Century, yet there,
in that damnable room . . .

Smith threw the door open.

Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw
Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to
a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman who wore a slop-shop blue
suit and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham
was ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily,
then I realized that a sort of tourniquet of wire-netting was screwed
so tightly about him that the flesh swelled out in knobs through the
mesh. There was blood--

"God in heaven!" screamed Smith frenziedly--"they have the wire-jacket
on him! Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot! Shoot!"

Lithely as a cat the man with the knife leaped around--but I raised
the Browning, and deliberately--with a cool deliberation that came to
me suddenly--shot him through the head. I saw his oblique eyes turn up
to the whites; I saw the mark squarely between his brows; and with no