"Know you, then, that this White Knight is a mysterious being of whom, so far, no one has yet any knowledge. Maybe he is a man, possibly a woman, or perhaps a bastard brat sent up from Hell to assist the Devil's spawn, the _bourgeoisie_. "He was first heard of about a month ago, when the People's Commissary at Balassagyarmat arrested the outlaw Stephen Arpad. It was known to Bela Kun that this Stephen Arpad was indulging in treasonable correspondence with traitors here in Budapest with a view to establishing a White counter-revolution. "Well, friends, Bela Kun awaited his time, but at last this dog Arpad was arrested and thrown into the Balassagyarmat jail, and there he was kept awaiting the time when Tibor Szamuelly should arrive to hang him. "On the night before Szamuelly arrived, what do you think happened, friends? Arpad escaped." There was a deep-throated growl from the crowd, and Wenzel, realizing that he was working them up, and appreciating the fact that he was at the moment the centre of interest, became more bombastically theatrical. "Yes, comrades," he continued, his ugly face glowing malignantly, "Arpad escaped, and there was no one to offer any explanation. All that was found in his cell was a small chess-piece, a white knight. "What did Szamuelly do? Why, he did what all good Communists should do. He hanged the commissary as a warning to others not to let good hanging meat escape in the same way." Wenzel roared with laughter; but there was no one to join in with him. Steeped in bloody thoughts and deeds, familiar with ghastly sights, insane with revolutionary lust as they were, yet Wenzel appalled them. At least a head higher than the tallest of his listeners, he was conspicuous, not only by his height, but likewise by his face, his head, and his general appearance. In the first place, his greasy cap, gaudily illuminated by a brilliant Red cockade, the badge of the Communist and the proletariat, did not entirely conceal his closely cropped head of hair, naturally parted on the right-hand side by a vivid and extraordinarily straight scar--one of the many which disfigured his strange features. Six scars there were, including the one described above. There was one which shaved his left eyebrow, one which scored his left cheek, one which stretched from his mouth, pulling it perpetually out of shape across to the lobe of his right ear, one small one just above, and finally one across his throat, creating the ghastly impression that the man had once endeavoured to commit suicide by inflicting there, with a razor, a self-made wound. Two of the scars, though obviously healed up, were so deeply impressed into the skin that at times they betrayed traces of the warm blood which flowed beneath. His emotions aroused, these two wounds flushed redly, as if on the point of reopening. The effect of these blemishes was to make the man so hideously ugly that it was disgusting to cast eyes upon him.