"Cheer up, friend; do not let your fears get the better of you. Surround yourself with a few of the Red guards; you must have a pocketful of crowns else you cannot be much of a commissary. Grease a few palms. The White Knight is only a man after all." Gonnard looked up. "Gunzi, I am afraid," he whispered hoarsely. The detective shrugged his shoulders. "Then you had better do as I suggest as soon as you can. Meanwhile ... I think I will go and see our friend who sent the telegram." Gonnard, shivering with apprehension, watched the detective depart. Gunzi had failed, the White Knight was at liberty. He clutched his throat with his hands. He seemed to feel the rasp of the rope. "Oh, Father in Heaven! Oh, Holy Mary!" Again and again he breathed aloud these words. Life was so precious, so dear to him, and to-morrow he might die, hang as he had seen a man hanged scarcely a month back when Szamuelly had sat in judgment at one of the wayside stations. Clearly and concisely, as though he were at a cinema watching the unfolding of a photographic drama, he remembered the horror depicted on the man's face as he was marched toward the gallows. Vividly he recollected the sudden jerk, the body stiffening.... "Save me, our Father, save me!" he wailed, his uneducated mentality incapable of varying his conjurations. "Oh; God, save me!" The curtain at the window stirred slightly. With a sudden jerk which set his heart tumbling and beating Gonnard turned his fear-shot eyes in that direction. He saw it was but a sudden puff of wind, but it might have been the White Knight, and at the mere idea he whimpered to himself. Well had Wenzel summed up the character of the Communist. As reparation for the death of Coloman, Gonnard was suffering the tortures of the damned. Conscience and cowardice were taking their toll of the man. Somewhere in the streets a clock chimed, and Gonnard started. Eleven o'clock. Another thirteen hours and the morrow would arrive and then ... He crouched back into the chair, his hands warding off an invisible horror. To-morrow the White Knight would come for him and he would hang ... hang.... Mentally unhinged by the White Knight's repeated warnings, it never occurred to Gonnard that, as Gunzi had suggested, he might easily have surrounded himself by wily guards who would have been more than sufficient to protect the commissary against the cunning of the White Knight. Yet, with an uncanny insight, Wenzel had foreseen the consequences of his melodramatic policy. It was not from bravado, or a leaning toward the theatrical, that Wenzel sent the warning messages to Gonnard. He wished to create the impression of omnipotence, to hypnotize his victim into positive belief in the powers of the White Knight. Then he had intended to play a similar trick to the one he had perpetrated in Budapest when he had rescued the Count Bakocz.