Minglapo had reached forward and lifted the blue loose-hanging blouse of the spy, rolling it well up above the shoulders. The bare brown chest and back showed scarred and blackened from some terrible maiming in the past. There were series of lumpy welts upon the back which Minglapo examined minutely. The disfigurations of the chest were of a different nature, long pale scars over which the skin stretched with a honey-like transparency. "One of the most trusted of his kind beyond a doubt," said Nifton Bend. "This is not the first time he has been caught. Those three-barred welts on his back are from the Siberian knout, a devilish contrivance made of knotted whip-cord soaked in brine. The dark rashy appearance in spots is also from the North—frost-bite. We have a hero in our midst, Mr. Romney, one of the real ones whose names are never known." The spy stood perfectly unemotional, looking upward, turning obediently whenever Minglapo took his arm. "... He knows it is his last half-hour—" The last was in a sense abrupt to Romney. He had been so absorbed in the whole game of these passionate nationalists, that the life and death end of it for the one caught had been put aside from his mind for the moment. Minglapo arose and drew a goblet of water from the cooler, opened the lacquer box, took forth a small metal case which contained a long needle. The pressure of it all was now a trifle heavy, even for the well-repressed American. The excellence of physical manhood manifested in the whole affair did not take away entirely the fact that the spy was about to be murdered. Romney felt he could not stay. His head turned to Minglapo and back to Nifton Bend. Their faces were expressionless and half averted. They would have accepted a reversal that meant death to them, with the same external calm that characterized the manner of the spy.... Yet the American could not lift. He was no stranger to the various fashions of brutality, but the temptation to pluck the stupor needle from the hand of Minglapo was well nigh overpowering. The unoccupied hand of the master was now held out toward the servant as if to take his arm. Very slowly the spy’s hand lifted from his side, the palm toward Minglapo’s, moving forward as one would grope in the dark. Over his face was that same eternal quietude like a faint reflection of day in the sky at evening. That tableau seemed immortally fixed in Romney’s mind. He leaned forward, his hands gripping his ankles as he sat.... Suddenly the principal was plucked from the centre of things. It was the queerest extraction—a sort of side-lurching as if the spy’s body had been hurled past.... A quick shot from Nifton Bend at Romney’s left—the voice of Minglapo in English—then a crash of glass and frame as the body of the spy hurled itself through the forward casement. "Your work, Friend Romney. Get him, or all is ruined!" this from Minglapo.