he stooped, and toward death he walked with dragging feet. His face of a Roman senator was smeared from the cow dung into which they had flung him for his last slumber.
As they tramped out through the quadrangle gate, Ensign Stoyt, commanding the squad, halted Henry, laughed at him, and calmly kicked him in the groin.
They lifted him up. Three minutes later Doremus heard a ripple of shots. Three minutes after that the squad came back bearing on an old door a twisted clay figure with vacant open eyes. Then Doremus cried aloud. As the bearers slanted the stretcher, the figure rolled to the ground.
But one thing worse he was to see through the accursed window. The guards drove in, as new prisoners, Julian Falck, in torn uniform, and Julian’s grandfather, so fragile, so silvery, so bewildered and terrified in his muddied clericals.
He saw them kicked across the quadrangle into a building once devoted to instruction in dancing and the more delicate airs for the piano; devoted now to the torture room and the solitary cells.
Not for two weeks, two weeks of waiting that was like ceaseless ache, did he have a chance, at exercise hour, to speak for a moment to Julian, who muttered, “They caught me writing some inside dope about M.M. graft. It was to have gone to Sissy. Thank God, nothing on it to show who it was for!” Julian had passed on. But Doremus had had time to see that his eyes were hopeless, and that his neat, smallish, clerical face was blue-black with bruises.
The administration (or so Doremus guessed) decided that Julian, the first spy among the M.M.‘s who had been caught in the Fort Beulah region, was too good a subject of sport to be wastefully shot at once. He should be kept for
