st side of the house, and Ivery had been
lying. He had already lied in his boasting of how he had outwitted me
in England and at the Front. He might be lying about Mary ... No, I
dismissed that hope. Those words of his had rung true enough.

I thought for a minute and concluded that he had lied to terrorize me
and keep me quiet; therefore this infernal contraption had probably its
weak point. I reflected, too, that I was pretty strong, far stronger
probably than Ivery imagined, for he had never seen me stripped. Since
the place was pitch dark I could not guess how the thing worked, but I
could feel the cross-bars rigid on my chest and legs and the side-bars
which pinned my arms to my sides ... I drew a long breath and tried to
force my elbows apart. Nothing moved, nor could I raise the bars on my
legs the smallest fraction.

Again I tried, and again. The side-bar on my right seemed to be less
rigid than the others. I managed to get my right hand raised above the
level of my thigh, and then with a struggle I got a grip with it on the
cross-bar, which gave me a small leverage. With a mighty effort I drove
my right elbow and shoulder against the side-bar. It seemed to give
slightly ... I summoned all my strength and tried again. There was a
crack and then a splintering, the massive bar shuffled limply back, and
my right arm was free to move laterally, though the cross-bar prevented
me from raising it.

With some difficulty I got at my coat pocket where reposed my electric
torch and my pistol. With immense labour and no little pain I pulled
the former out and switched it on by drawing the catch against the
cross-bar. Then I saw my prison house.

It was a little square chamber, very high, with on my left the massive
door by which Ivery had departed. The dark baulks of my rack were
plain, and I could roughly make out how the thing had been managed.
Some spring had tilted up the flooring, and dropped the framework from
its place in the right-hand wall. It was clamped, I observed, by an
arrangement in the floor just in front of the door. If I could get rid
of that catch it would be easy to free myself, for to a man of my
strength the weight would not be impossibly heavy.

My fortitude had come back to me, and I was living only in the moment,
choking down any hope of escape. My first job was to destroy the catch
that clamped down the rack, and for that my only weapon was my pistol.
I managed to get the little electric torch