e of the five-inch ventilating slits high in the wall.
Carse regarded it with his hard stare until the door clicked behind the
coolies and they were once more alone. Then his head returned to its
bowed position, and Friday approached the apparatus and began to examine
it with the curiosity of the born mechanic he was.

"Let it be, Friday," the Hawk ordered tonelessly.

A dozen minutes passed in silence.

The silence was outward: there was no quiet in the adventurer's head. He
could not stop the sharp remorseless voice which kept sounding in his
brain. Its pitiless words flailed him unceasingly with their stinging
taunts. "You--you whom they call the Hawk," it would say; "you, the
infallible one--you, so recklessly, egotistically confident--you have
brought this to pass! Not only have you allowed yourself to be trapped,
but Eliot Leithgow! He is out there now; and soon his brain will be
condemned forever to that which you have seen! The brain that trusted
you! And you have brought this to pass! Yours the blame, the
never-failing Hawk! All yours--yours--yours!"

A voice reached him from far away. A soft negro voice which said,
timidly:

"They're beginning, suh. Captain Carse? On the screen, suh; they're
beginning."

That was worse. The real ordeal was approaching. True, he might have
thrown himself on the coolie-guards who had just left--but his death
would not have helped old M. S.

Friday spoke again, and this time his words leaped roaring into Carse's
ears. He raised his head and looked.

The tubes behind the screen were crackling, and the screen itself had
come to life. He was looking at the laboratory. But the place was
changed.

* * * * *

What had before been a wide circular room, with complicated machines and
unnamed scientific apparatus following only its walls, so as to leave
the center of its floor empty and free from obstructions, was now a
place of deep shadow pierced by a broad cone of blinding white light
which shafted down from some source overhead and threw into brilliant
emphasis only the center of the room.

The light struck straight down upon an operating table. At its head
stood a squat metal cylinder sprouting a long flexible tube which ended
in a cone--no doubt the anesthetizing apparatus. A stepped-back tier of
white metal drawers flanked one side of the table, upon its various
upper surfaces an array of gleaming surgeon's tools. In neat squads