ing was used ostensibly as a shooting and hunting-box by
Michael Roburoff and a couple of his friends, and in reality as a
meeting-place for the Inner Circle or Executive Council of the
American Section of the Brotherhood. This Section was, numerically
speaking, the most important of the four branches into which the
Outer Circle of the Brotherhood was divided--that is to say, the
British, Continental, American, and Colonial Sections.

All told, the Terrorists had rather more than five million adherents
in America and Canada, of whom more than four millions were men in
the prime of life, and nearly all of Anglo-Saxon blood and English
speech. All these men were not only armed, but trained in the use of
firearms to a high degree of skill; their organisation, which had
gradually grown up with the Brotherhood for twenty years, was known
to the world only under the guise of the different forms of
industrial unionism, but behind these there was a perfect system of
discipline and command which the outer world had never even
suspected.

The Section was divided first into squads of ten under the command of
an eleventh, who alone knew the leaders of the other squads in his
neighbourhood. Ten of these squads made a company, commanded by one
man, who was only known to the squad-captains, and who alone knew the
captain of the regiment, which was composed of ten companies.

The next step in the organisation was the brigade, consisting of ten
regiments, the captains of which alone knew the commander of the
brigade, while the commanders of the brigades were alone acquainted
with the members of the Inner Circle or Executive Council which
managed the affairs of the whole Section, and whose Chief was the
only man in the Section who could hold any communication with the
Inner Circle of the Brotherhood itself, which, under the immediate
command of Natas, governed the whole organisation throughout the
world.

This description will serve for all the Sections, as all were
modelled upon exactly the same plan. The advantages of such an
organisation will at once be obvious. In the first place, no member
of the rank and file could possibly betray more than ten of his
fellows, including his captain; while his treachery could, if
necessary, be made known in a few hours to ten thousand others, not
one of whom he knew, and thus it would be impossible for him to
escape the invariable death penalty. The same is, of course, equally
true of the capt