As Gavin Brice sat with feet drawn up under him, listening to the gruesome slither of the moccasins along the concrete floor just below he was gripped for a minute by irresistible terror. It was all so simple--so complete! And he had been calmly self-confident of his ability to command the situation, to play these people's own game and to beat them at it. Grinning and open-eyed he had marched into the trap. He had been glad to let Hade and Standish think him safely out of their way, and had planned so confidently to return by stealth to the mainland that night and to Milo's house! And now they had had absolutely no difficulty in caging him, and in arranging that he should be put forever out of their way. The most stringent inquiry--should any such be made--could only show that he had been bitten once or more by a deadly snake. Any post-mortem would bear out the statement. It was known to every one that many of the keys--even several miles from the mainland--are infested by rattlesnakes and by other serpents, though how such snakes ever got to the islands is as much of a mystery to the naturalist world as is the presence of raccoons and squirrels on the same keys. It is simply one of the hundred unsolvable mysteries and puzzles of the subtropic region. In his jiu-jutsu instructions Brice had learned a rule which he had carried into good effect in other walks of life. Namely to seem to play one's opponent's game and to be fooled 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 Wilhelmstrasse'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.