Part 34 (1/2)

The Slav in Bothwell had failed to understand the Anglo-Saxon blood with which he was dealing.

I faced the man with a dry laugh.

”We'll see. Begin, you coward!”

Pinned down to the table as I was, he struck me in the face for that.

”You lose no time in proving my words true,” I jeered.

An odd mixture is man. Faith, one might have thought Bothwell impervious to shame, but at my words the fellow flushed. He could not quite forget that he had once been a gentleman.

In the way of business he could torture me, wipe me from his path without a second thought, but on the surface he must live up to the artificial code his training had imposed upon him.

”I beg your pardon, Mr. Sedgwick. Were there time I would give you satisfaction for that blow in the customary manner. But time presses. I shall have to ask you instead to accept my apologies. I have the devil of a temper.”

”So I judge.”

”It flares like powder. But I must not waste your time in explanations.”

From his vest pocket he drew three little cubes of iron. ”You still have time, Mr. Sedgwick. The map!”

I flushed to the roots of my hair.

”Never, you Russian devil!”

He selected the hand pinned down by Fleming, perhaps because he was not sure that he could trust Gallagher. Between my fingers close to the roots he slipped the cubes. His fingers fastened over mine and drew the ends of them together slowly, steadily.

An excruciating pain shot through me. I set my teeth to keep from screaming and closed my eyes to hide the anguish in them.

”You are at liberty to change your mind--and your answer, Mr. Sedgwick,”

he announced suavely.

”You devil from h.e.l.l!”

Again I suffered that jagged bolt of pain. It seemed as if my fingers were being rent asunder at the roots. I could not concentrate my attention on anything but the physical agony, yet it seems to me now that Gallagher was muttering a protest across the table.

Bothwell released my hand. I saw a flash of subtle triumph light his eyes.

”A wilful man must have his way, Mr. Sedgwick,” he nodded to me, then whispered in the ear of George Fleming, who at once left the room.

They pulled me up from the table and seated me in a chair. Bothwell whistled a bar or two of the s.e.xtet from Lucia until he was interrupted by the entrance of the engineer with Jimmie Welch.

In a flash I knew what the man meant to do, and the devilish ingenuity of it appalled me. He had concluded that I was strung up to endure anything he might inflict.

Now he was going to force me to tell what I knew in order to save the boy from the pain I had myself found almost unendurable.

What must I do? I beat my wits for a way out. One glance around the room showed me that the scoundrel's accomplices would not let him go much further.

The weak spot in his leaders.h.i.+p was that he did not realize the humanity which still burned in their lost souls. But at what point would they revolt? I could not let little Jimmie go through the pain I had undergone.