rles--you--you have been poisoned like the rest?"

* * * * *

The feeling of watching eyes and listening ears was strong. Bell had a
part to play, and the necessity for playing that part was the greater
because now he was forced to hope. He hesitated, torn between the need
to play his role for the invisible eavesdroppers and the desire to spare
Paula.

Her hand closed convulsively upon his.

"V-very well, Charles," she said quietly, though her lips quivered.
"If--if you are going to serve The Master, I--I will serve him too, if
he will let me stay always near you. But if he--will not, then I can
always--die...."

Bell groaned. And the door opened silently, and there were men standing
without. An emotionless voice said:

"Senorita, the Senor Ortiz will interview the Senor Bell."

"I'm coming," said Paula quietly.

She went, walking steadily. Two men detached themselves from the group
about the door and followed her. The others waited for Bell. And Bell
clenched his hands and squared his shoulders and marched grimly with
them.

* * * * *

Again long passages, descending to what must have been a good deal below
the surface of the earth. And then a massive door was opened, and light
shone through, and Bell found himself standing on a rug of the thickest
possible pile in a room of quite barbaric luxury, and facing a desk from
which a young man was rising to greet him. This young man was no older
than Bell himself, and he greeted Bell in a manner in which mockery was
entirely absent, but in which defiance was peculiarly strong. A bulky,
round shouldered figure wrote laboriously at a smaller desk to one side.

"Senor Bell," said the young man bitterly, "I do not ask you to shake
hands with me. I am Julio Ortiz, the son of the man you befriended upon
the steamer _Almirante Gomez_. I am also, by the command of The Master,
your jailer. Will you be seated?"

Bell's eyes flickered. The older Ortiz had died by his own hand in the
first stages of the murder madness The Master's poison produced. He had
died gladly and, in Bell's view, very gallantly. And yet his son.... But
of course The Master's deputies made a point of enslaving whole families
when it was at all possible. It gave a stronger hold upon each member.

"I beg of you," said young Ortiz bitterly, "to accept my invitation. I
wish to offer you a much qualified friendship, which I expect you to
refu