Once more, Roke grinned broadly.  “I ain’t seen hide nor hair of Mr. Hade, not since this afternoon,” said he.  “I been spendin’ the evenin’ over to Landon’s.  Landon is a tryin’ to sell me his farm.  Says the soil on it is so rich that he ships carloads of it up North, to use for fertilizer.  Says—­”

“Sato!” broke in Brice.  “Can you make him talk?  Miss Standish, will you please go somewhere else for five minutes?  This is not going to be a pretty sight.”

As the girl turned, obediently yet reluctantly, from the room, the Jap, with a smile of perfect bliss on his yellow face, advanced toward Roke.

The big man wheeled, contemptuously, upon him.  Sato sprang at him.  With a hammerlike fist, Roke smote at the oncoming pigmy.  The arm struck, to its full length.  But it did not reach its mark, nor return to the striker’s side.  By a queerly crablike shift of his wiry body, the Jap had eluded the blow, and had fastened upon the arm, above the elbow and at the wrist.

A cross-pull wrench of the Jap’s body brought a howl of pain from Roke and sent him floundering helplessly to his knees, while the merest leverage pressure from his conqueror held him there.  But the Jap was doing more.  The giant’s arm was bending backward and sideways at an impossible angle.  Nor could its owner make a move to avert the growing unbearable torture.  It was one of the simplest, yet one of the most effective and agonizing, holds in all jiujutsu.

Thirty seconds of it, and Roke’s bull-like endurance went to pieces under the strain.  Raucously and blubberingly he screeched for mercy.  The Jap continued happily to exert the cross-pull pressure.

“Will you speak up?” queried Brice, sickened at the sight, but steeling himself with the knowledge of the captive’s crimes and of the vast amount at stake.

Roke rolled his eyes horribly, grinding his yellowed teeth together to check his own cries.  Then, sobbingly, he blurted: 

“Yes!  Lemme loose!”

“Not till you tell,” refused Gavin.  “Quick, now!”

“Second panel from left-hand window,” moaned the stricken and anguished Roke.  “Push beading up and then to right.  He’s—­ he’s safe away, by now, anyway,” he blubbered, in self-justification of the confession which agony had wrung from him.  “All you’ll get is the—­the—­”

And, the pain having eaten into his very brain, he yelled incoherently.

Ten minutes later, Milo Standish sought out his sister, in the upper room whither she had fled, in fear, to escape from the racket of Roke’s outcries.

“Listen!” he jabbered boyishly, in utter excitement.  “Brice made him tell how Rodney got out!  How d’you s’pose?  One of the old panels, in the music room, slides back, and there’s a flight of stone steps down to a cellar that’s right alongside our regular cellar, with only a six inch cement-and-lath wall between.  It leads out, to the tunnel.  Right