confident smile on his masklike, pallid face, the spy had
turned his glittering black eyes on the officers at the
courtmartial table.

"Gentlemen," he had said amusedly. "you need not go through
the farce of trying me. I am guilty. I say this with no
bravado and with no fear. Because the bullet has never been
molded and the rope has never been plaited that can kill me.
And the cell is not yet made that can hold me."

He had said it smilingly, and in a velvet suave voice. Yes,
and he had made good his boast. For--condemned to die at
daylight--he had escaped from his ill-constructed prison room
in the chateau a little before dawn and had gotten clean away
after killing one of his guards.

"He never set eyes on me except for that instant, there in the
shadows," Brice found himself reflecting for the hundredth
time. "And there were all the others with me. Yet last night
he recalled my face. It's lucky he didn't recall where he'd
seen it. Or--perhaps he did."

With a start. he came out of his half-hypnotic daze--a daze
which had endured but a few seconds. And once more his
rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the
hideous peril in which he crouched.

Then--in one of the odd revulsions which flash across men at
unnaturally high tension--his daze and his terror merged all
at once into a blaze of wholesome rage. Nor was his rage