Two spearmen brought him in; as he walked, the chains which hung from his arms and legs clanked on the floor. He did not deign at first to glance at Pan Andrew or any of his party, but simply looked at the King and folded his arms defiantly and with spirit. Whereat the two guards forced him to his knees. His air of indifference disappeared, however, when his eyes fell upon the Tarnov Crystal which the King had set down upon the floor before him. He glanced left and right and favored the trumpeter and the alchemist with a look of bitter hatred. “You are accused of treason against the Commonwealth of Poland,” said the King immediately. “Have you any plea to make?” “Who accuses me?” “The governors of the Ukraine,” answered the King. “And moreover you are charged with other crimes, among them that of persecuting this citizen here before me—you have destroyed his home and fields, and attacked him while he was on duty in the church tower. The penalty for any one of these is death.” Peter did not lose his self-assurance for a moment. He realized more quickly than another might that his plea of innocence would soon be broken down. He fell back then quickly upon another means of obtaining his end. “I would buy my freedom,” he asserted. “What have you that is worth while to me?” asked the King. “Much. You are threatened in the Ukraine.” The King thought for some minutes. It rather irked him to give this man his life since he had already done such damage, but on the other hand he might be able to obtain some really valuable information. The whole Ukraine was in some kind of uproar, and even his most trusted spies had not been able to get to the bottom of it. The usual method of obtaining information from prisoners in those days was torture, and in the field of battle it was employed widely, but often in cases of such desperate men as Peter torture led them to confess wildly but seldom with truth. The Cossack was ordinarily a man of his word, and Peter had enough Cossack blood in him to make him pass for a Cossack in the Ukraine and in the East. “It pleases me to be merciful to-day,” replied the King. “There has been too much suffering at my very gates to make me wish for more. Your death would in no way pay for your crimes, and it is possible that your information might be of service to the commonwealth. I could wrest this information from you by torture, but I prefer an easier way. . . . Now, mark,” he cautioned the Cossack, “I know certain facts concerning what you have to tell, I have information from my own men in the Ukraine, and if you utter so much as one word of a falsehood to me, I will have you taken out and hanged by the neck from the tower gate. Do you understand?”