d-scaled chin-guards. The knot of struggling figures suddenly
widened out into a half-circle, then came a quick command, a cry
in French--"Ah! God!"--and something shot up into the air and
hung from a tree, dangling, full in the firelight.

It was the writhing body of a man.

Jack turned his head away, then covered his eyes with his hands.
Beside him a tall Uhlan, swathed to the eyes in his great-coat,
leaned on a lance and smoked in silence.

Suddenly a voice broke out in the night: "Links! vorwaerts!" There
came a regular tramp of feet--one, two! one, two!--across the
grass, past the fire, and straight to where Jack sat, his face in
his arms.

The bright glare of lanterns dazzled him as he looked up, but he
saw a line of men with bared sabres standing to his right--tall
Uhlans, buttoned to the chin in their sombre overcoats,
helmet-cords oscillating in the lantern glow.

Another Uhlan, standing erect before him, had been speaking for a
second or two before he even heard him.

"Prisoner, do you understand German?" repeated the Uhlan,
harshly.

"Yes," muttered Jack. He began to shiver, perhaps from the chill
of the wet earth.

"Stand up!"

Jack stumbled to his numbed feet. A drop of blood rolled into his
eye and he mechanically wiped it away. He tried to look at the
man before him; he could not, for his fascinated eyes returned to
that thing that hung on a rope from the great sprawling
oak-branch at the edge of the grove.

Like a vague voice in a dream he heard his own name pronounced;
he heard a sonorous formula repeated in a heavy, dispassionate
voice--"accused of having resisted a picquet of his Prussian
Majesty's 11th Regiment of Uhlan cavalry, of having wilfully,
maliciously, and with murderous design fired upon and wounded
trooper Kohlmann of said picquet while in pursuit of his duty."

Again he heard the same voice: "The law of non-combatants
operating in such cases leaves no doubt as to the just penalty
due."

Jack straightened up and looked the officer in the eyes. Ah! now
he knew him--the map-maker of the carrefour, the sneak-thief who
had scaled the park wall with the box--that was the face he had
struck with his clenched fist, the same pink, high-boned face,
with the little, pale, pig-like eyes. In the same second the
man's name came back to him as he had deciphered it written in
pencil on the maps--Siurd von Steyr!

Von Steyr's eyes grew smaller and paler, and an ugly flush mounted
to h