by it, and then, taking the conquering adversary by surprise,
to strike. Thus he had fallen in with Standish's suggestion
that he come to the island, though he had thought himself
fairly sure as to the reason for the request. Thus, too, he
had let himself be lured into this storeroom, still smugly
confident that he held the whip hand of the situation.

And as a result he was looking into the ghastly eyes of death.

Like an engine that "races," his fertile brain was unduly
active in this moment of stark horror, and it ran uselessly.
Into his over-excited mind flashed pictures of a thousand bits
of the past--one of them. by reason of recent association far
more vivid than the rest.

He saw himself with four other A.E.F. officers, standing in a
dim corner of a high-ceiled old room in a ruined chateau in
Flanders. In the room's center was a table. Around this
were grouped a double line of uniformed Americans--a
court-martial. In came two provosts' men leading between them
a prisoner, a man in uniform and wearing the insignia of a
United States army major--the cleverest spy it was said in
all the Wilhehnstrasse's pay, a genius who had grown rich at
his filthy trade of selling out his country's secrets. and
who had been caught at last by merest chance.

The prisoner had glanced smilingly about the half-lit room as
he came in. For the barest fraction of a second his gaze had
flickered over Gavin Brice and the three other officers who
stood there in the shadow. Then, with that same easy.