But it was necessary to keep after him, for Perkins knew that his career was at stake.  He was supposed to have found out something, and he hadn’t!  So he ordered Jimmie tied up by the thumbs, the poor thumbs that were swollen to three times their normal size, and nearly black in colour.  But now Jimmie’s good Mother Nature interfered to stop the proceedings; the pain was so exquisite that Jimmie fainted, and when the sergeant saw that he was being cheated, he cut his victim down and left him lying on the damp stones.

So for three days Jimmie’s life consisted of alternating swoons and agony—­the regular routine of the “third degree” in more obstinate cases; and always, in his conscious moments, Jimmie called upon the God in himself, and the God responded with his hosts, and trumpets of triumph echoed in Jimmie’s soul and he did not “come through”.

So on the fourth day the three torturers entered the cell, and lifted him to his feet, and carried him up the stone stairs, and wrapped him in a blanket and put him in an automobile.

“Listen now,” said Perkins, who sat by his side, “they’re going to try you by court-martial.  Hear me?”

Jimmie made no response.

“And I’ll explain this for your health—­if you tell any lies about what we done to you, I’ll take you back to that dungeon and tear you limb from limb.  You get me?” Still Jimmie did not answer—­the sullen little devil, thought Perkins.  But in Jimmie’s soul there was a faint flicker of hope.  Might he not make appeal to the higher authorities, and be saved from further torture?  Jimmie had believed in his country, and in his country’s purpose to defend democracy; he had read the wonderful speeches of President Wilson, and could not bring himself to think that the President would permit any man to be tortured in prison.  But alas, it was a long way from the White House to Archangel—­and still longer if you measured it through the ramifications of the army machine, a route more thoroughly criss-crossed with red tape than any sector of the Hindenburg line with barbed wire.

Jimmie was taken into a room where seven officers sat at a big table, looking very stern and solemn.  Perkins supported him under the arm-pits, thus making it look as if he were walking.  He was placed in a chair, and took a glance about him—­but without seeing much hope in the faces which confronted him.

The president of the court-martial was Major Gaddis, who had been a professor of economics in a great university before the war:  that is to say, he had been selected by a syndicate of bankers as a man who believed in a ruling class, and could never by any possibility be brought to believe in anything else.  He was a man of strict honour, a very gracious and cultivated gentleman if you happened to belong in his social circle; but he was convinced that the duty of the lower classes was to obey, and that the existence of civilized society depended upon their being made to obey.