re mesh, thanked him in
the politest language known. He began, then, to make points, touches,
wherever he chose--with a remarkably timed twist he tore the cloth
heart from Charles' wadding; he indicated, as though he were a teacher
with a pointer, anatomical facts and regions; de Vaca seemed to be
calling Charles' attention, by sharp premonitory taps, to what he
might have been saying. There were now a number of voices encouraging
and applauding him; he was begged not to be so hard upon Gaspar; and
it was hoped that he was not giving way to the venting of a secret
spite. A nerveless parry in tierce brought out a tempestuous
support--

His arm was as heavy, as numb, as lead, the conventional period had
been ignored, and his torment went on and on. His chest, he thought,
must burst under the strapped plastron, and sweat poured in a sheet
across his eyes. The episode seemed utterly meaningless, undemanded;
the more remarkable because of de Vaca's indifference to him, to all
the trivialities of his Cuban duty. How yellow the face was, the eyes
were like jet, through the mask. Then Charles Abbott grasped what, he
was certain, was the purpose of such an apparently disproportionate
attack. It was the result of a cold effort, a set determination, to
destroy what courage he had. He gazed quickly about, and saw nothing
but Spanish faces; the fencing master was in the far end of the room,
intent upon a sheaf of foils. At any moment de Vaca could have
disarmed him, sent his steel flying through air; but that he forebore
to do. Instead he opposed his skill, his finesse, his strength, in the
attack upon Charles Abbott's fibre.

"If I collapse," Charles told himself, "it will be for eternity."

Any sense of time was disintegrated in a physical agony which required
all his wasting being to combat. But, even worse than that, far more
destructive, was the assault upon his mind. If he crumbled ... he
thought of himself as dust, his brain a dry powder in his skull. The
laughter around him, which had seemed to retreat farther and farther,
had ceased, as though it had been lost in the distance. The room,
widening to an immensity of space, was silent, charged with a
malignant expectancy. Soon, Charles felt, he would fall into
unreckoned depths of corrupt shadows, among the obscene figures of the
hideously lost.

The sweat streaming into his mouth turned thick and salt--blood, from
his nose. There was a tumult in his head: his fencing now