sting
of the cruel lash pervaded his whole body, but he only shut his
teeth the harder and waited for what next was to come.

"Where will the concentration take place?"

The words came like the knell of doom, the monotony of their tone
was appalling.

"I do not know," replied George again.

Again the lash fell, with another cut added--again he writhed in
pain, pain that was anguish of mind as well as of body. He felt as
if his brain was bursting with the dreadful slowness of the
proceedings. It seemed to him that if he were to receive a hundred
lashes in quick succession he could easily stand it, but the torture
of the delay was fearful.

Again the fiendish inquisitor asked his question, and again our hero
replied in the negative. Four more frightful cuts of the inexorable
kourbash fell on his rapidly-scarring back. The torture he endured
was frightful, not a single blow from the raw-hide thong but was
timed to produce the utmost effect; his back was waled in large
ridges, and with a fiendish cruelty the inhuman executioner with
unfailing aim had smote and re-smote him in the same place. Already
he could feel that the skin had burst, and it came almost as a
relief as he felt the flow of blood down his back. Again and again
the malignant man in the chair asked his question. Again and again
the answer came from our hero, followed quickly by the increased
number of lashes from his executioner.

The terrible punishment was beginning to tell; already George had
passed from the defiant stage to one of patient endurance. As the
torture continued his body began to feel numbed, and he became
light-headed; he caught himself counting in a foolish manner the
number of strokes he had received, and as each one fell, he would
add two or three according to whether he felt it more or less than
its predecessor. Once he even laughed as the man struck him on a
part of his body that was clothed, with the effect that the
executioner, enraged at the levity, redoubled his merciless attack.

The light-headed stage passed off and was replaced by a feeling of
horrible despair. He wondered when these monsters would have vented
their spite sufficiently; he wondered if he would be alive at the
end of the castigation, or if they would flay the flesh from his
body. He thought of the ignominious ending it would be to his brief
career with the fighting line.

[Illustration: "He was already beyond crying out. All sense of feeling
had left him