pseudo taxicab driver was so ill-advised as to refuse to answer the
SAME questions that I have put to you."

Five to one! That was the only way out--and it was hopeless. It was the
only way out, because, convinced that he could answer those questions if
he wanted to, these men were in deadly earnest; it was hopeless, because
they were--five to one! And probably there were as many more, twice or
three times as many more within call. But what did it matter how many
more there were! He could fight until he was overpowered, that was all
he could do, and the five could accomplish that. Still, if he could
knock the full glass out of that man's hand, and gain the door, then
perhaps--he turned quickly, as the door opened. It was as though they
had read his thoughts. A number of men were grouped outside in the
corridor, then the door closed again with a cordon ranged against it
inside the room; and at the same instant his arms and wrists were caught
in a powerful grasp by the two men immediately behind him, who all along
had enacted the role of guards.

Again the leader spoke.

"I will repeat the questions," he said sharply. "Where is the woman
whose ring was found on that man there in the chair? And where is the
package that you two men had with you in the taxicab to-night?"

Jimmie Dale glanced from the tall, straight, immaculately clothed figure
of the speaker, from the threatening smile on the set lips that just
showed under the edge of the mask, to the dead man in the chair. He had
faced the prospect of death before many times, but it had come with the
heat of passion accompanying it, it had come quickly, abruptly, with
every faculty called into action to combat it, without time to dwell
upon it, to sift, weigh, or measure its meaning, and if there had been
fear it had been subordinate to other emotions. But it was different
now. He could not, of course, answer those questions; nor, he was
doggedly conscious, would he have answered them if he could--and there
was no middle course.

Death, within the next few moments, stared him in the face; and it
seemed curiously irrelevant that, in a sort of unnatural calmness, he
should be attempting to analyse his feelings and emotions concerning it.
All his life it had seemed to him that the acme of human mental
torture was the cell of a condemned criminal, with the horror of its
hopelessness, with the time to dwell upon it; and that the acme of
that torture itself must be that aw