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. 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 directed against Rodney Hade, but against Milo Standish, the man whose life he had saved not twenty hours earlier, and who had repaid that mighty service now by helping to arrange his murder.

At the thought Brice grew hot with fury.  He longed to stand face to face with the blackguard who had rewarded a life-gift in such vile fashion.  He yearned to tell Standish in fiery words how unspeakable had been the action, and then foot to foot, fist to fist, to take out of the giant’s hide some tithe of the revenge due for such black ingratitude.

The ferocious impulse set steady his quivering nerves.  No longer did his brain race uselessly.  Again it was alert, resourceful, keen.