LITMIR.BIZ

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of him first for being such a bum editor."

      "Him? An editor? Say! Listen! I got a swell idea. Hey! Fellas!" Four or five other M.M.'s, half dressed, looked out from a room down the hall. "This-here is a writing-fellow! I'm going to make him show us how he writes! Lookit!"

      The guard dashed down the corridor to a door with the sign "Gents" hung out in front of it, came back with paper, not clean, threw it in front of Doremus, and yammered, "Come on, boss. Show us how you write your pieces! Come on, write us a piece—with your nose!" He was iron-strong. He pressed Doremus's nose down against the filthy paper and held it there, while his mates giggled. They were interrupted by an officer, commanding, though leniently, "Come on, boys, cut out the monkeyshines and take this ——- to the bull pen. Trial this morning."

      Doremus was led to a dirty room in which half-a-dozen prisoners were waiting. One of them was Buck Titus. Over one eye Buck had a slatternly bandage which had so loosened as to show that his forehead was cut to the bone. Buck managed to wink jovially. Doremus tried, vainly, to keep from sobbing.

      He waited an hour, standing, arms tight at his side, at the demands of an ugly-faced guard, snapping a dog whip with which he twice slashed Doremus when his hands fell lax.

      Buck was led into the trial room just before him. The door was closed. Doremus heard Buck cry out terribly, as though he had been wounded to death. The cry faded into a choked gasping. When Buck was led out of the inner room, his face was as dirty and as pale as his bandage, over which blood was now creeping. The man at the door of the inner room jerked his thumb sharply at Doremus, and snarled, "You're next!"

      Now he would face Tasbrough!

      But in the small room into which he had been taken—and he was confused, because somehow he had expected a large courtroom—there was only the Ensign who had arrested him yesterday, sitting at a table, running through papers, while a stolid M.M. stood on either side of him, rigid, hand on pistol holster.

      The Ensign kept him waiting, then snapped with disheartening suddenness, "Your name!"

      "You know it!"

      The two guards beside Doremus each hit him.

      "Your name?"

      "Doremus Jessup."

      "You're a Communist!"

      "No I'm not!"

      "Twenty-five lashes—and the oil."

      Not believing, not understanding, Doremus was rushed across the room, into a cellar beyond. A long wooden table there was dark with dry blood, stank with dry blood. The guards seized Doremus, sharply jerked his head back, pried open his jaws, and poured in a quart of castor oil. They tore off his garments above the belt, flung them on the sticky floor. They threw him face downward on the long table and began to lash him with a one-piece steel fishing rod. Each stroke cut into the flesh of his back, and they beat him slowly, relishing it, to keep him from fainting too quickly. But he was unconscious when, to the guards' great diversion, the castor oil took effect. Indeed he did not know it till he found himself limp on a messy piece of gunnysacking on the floor of his cell.

      They awakened him twice during the night to demand, "You're a Communist, heh? You better admit it! We're going to beat the living tar out of you till you do!"

      Though he was sicker than he had ever been in his life, yet he was also angrier; too angry to admit anything whatever, even to save his wrecked life. He simply snarled "No." But on the third beating he savagely wondered if "No" was now a truthful answer. After each questioning he was pounded again with fists, but not lashed with the steel rod, because the headquarters doctor had forbidden it.

      He was a sporty-looking young doctor in plus-fours. He yawned at the guards, in the blood-reeking cellar, "Better cut out the lashes or this ——- will pass out on you."

      Doremus raised his head from the table to gasp, "You call yourself a doctor, and you associate with these murderers?"

      "Oh, shut up, you little ——-! Dirty traitors like you deserve to be beaten to death—and maybe you will be, but I think the boys ought to save you for the trial!" The doctor showed his scientific mettle by twisting Doremus's ear till it felt as though it were torn off, chuckled, "Go to it, boys," and ambled away, ostentatiously humming.

      For three nights he was questioned and lashed—once, late at night, by guards who complained of the inhuman callousness of their officers in making them work so late. They amused themselves by using an old harness strap, with a buckle on it, to beat him.

      He almost broke down when the examining Ensign declared that Buck Titus had confessed their illegal propaganda, and narrated so many details of the work that Doremus could almost have believed in the confession. He did not listen. He told himself, "No! Buck would die before he'd confess anything. It's all Aras Dilley's spying."

      The Ensign cooed, "Now if you'll just have the sense to copy your friend Titus and tell us who's in the conspiracy besides him and you and Wilgus and Webb, we'll let you go. We know, all right—oh, we know the whole plot!—but we just want to find out whether you've finally come to your senses and been converted, my little friend. Now who else was there? Just give us their names. We'll let you go. Or would you like the castor oil and the whip again?"

      Doremus did not answer.

      "Ten lashes," said the Ensign.

      He was chased out for half an hour's walk on the campus every afternoon—probably because he would have preferred lying on his hard cot, trying to keep still enough so that his heart would stop its deathly hammering. Half a hundred prisoners marched there, round and round senselessly. He passed Buck Titus. To salute him would have meant a blow from the guards. They greeted each other with quick eyelids, and when he saw those untroubled spaniel eyes, Doremus knew that Buck had not squealed.

      And in the exercise yard he saw Dan Wilgus, but Dan was not walking free; he was led out from the torture rooms by guards, and with his crushed nose, his flattened ear, he looked as though he had been pounded by a prizefighter. He seemed partly paralyzed. Doremus tried to get information about Dan from a guard in his cell corridor. The guard—a handsome, clear-cheeked young man, noted in a valley of the White Mountains as a local beau, and very kind to his mother—laughed, "Oh, your friend Wilgus? That chump thinks he can lick his weight in wildcats. I hear he always tries to soak the guards. They'll take that out of him, all right!"

      Doremus thought, that night—he could not be sure, but he thought he heard Dan wailing, half the night. Next morning he was told that Dan, who had always been so disgusted when he had had to set up the news of a weakling's suicide, had hanged himself in his cell.

      Then, unexpectedly, Doremus was taken into a room, this time reasonably large, a former English classroom turned into a court, for his trial.

      But it was not District Commissioner Francis Tasbrough who was on the bench, nor any Military Judge, but no less a Protector of the People than the great new Provincial Commissioner, Effingham Swan.

      Swan was looking at Doremus's article about him as Doremus was led up to stand before the bench. He spoke—and this harsh, tired-looking man was no longer the airy Rhodes Scholar who had sported with Doremus once like a boy pulling the wings off flies.

      "Jessup, do you plead guilty to seditious activities?"

      "Why—" Doremus looked helplessly about for something in the way of legal counsel.

      "Commissioner Tasbrough!" called Swan.

      So at last Doremus did see his boyhood playmate.

      Tasbrough did nothing so commendable as to avoid Doremus's eyes. Indeed he looked at Doremus directly, and most affably, as he spoke his piece:

      "Your Excellency, it gives me great pain to have to expose this man, Jessup, whom I have known all my life, and tried to help, but he always was a smart-aleck—he was a laughing-stock in Fort Beulah for the way he tried to show off as a great political leader!—and when the Chief was elected, he was angry because he didn't get any political office, and he went about everywhere trying to disaffect people—I

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