To his amazement a light of brighter intelligence shone in the captive officer’s face and he answered with what was absolute briskness compared to his former listless manner:
“Of course I can; but who are you?”
Rapidly Frank sketched out to him the events that had brought them there and all they had hoped to accomplish. Then in a saddened voice he had related the failure of their hopes and aspirations.
The lieutenant thanked them warmly for their loyalty, but urged them to save their lives if possible by acceding to Bellman’s demands. For himself, he said, he expected no better fate than to be left there to die.
“My life has been a living death at any rate,” he said, “since I came to this terrible place. Yours are the first kindly faces I have seen. I have lived as if in a dream.” He pressed his hand to his forehead. “It seems that I must do what they told me. I have even, as you know, aided in the betrayal of my government by aiding these men in preparing my invention. For the last two days, though, my mind has been getting clearer. I have realized what is going on about me. I can judge things in their true proportions.”
“But—pardon me for the question—” said Frank, “but when you——”
“I know,” interrupted the lieutenant, “you are going to say that when I came in here, I seemed stupefied. I was acting a part. I did not want Bellman to think that I had recovered my senses. I cannot understand it myself. Until yesterday everything was like a dream, now I can think once more like a rational man.”
Frank detailed to him the conversation that they had overheard in the boat the night before and the boast that Foyashi had made that he had placed the captive under his control.
“Ah, that is it,” exclaimed the lieutenant eagerly, “since Foyashi has gone I have felt this new life of my brain, but hark—there’s somebody coming.”
His ears, sharpened by his long captivity, were keener than the boys’ for it was not till the serang with the red band on his arm entered the place that they heard any indication of the arrival of the newcomer. He came straight up to the boys and informed them that it was the order of his master that he should search them. His manner was not insolent or rough, it was simply the manner of the lay figure who does as he is told and asked no questions. Indignant but helpless Harry submitted to the search. He begged the man to let him keep his mother’s picture which he carried in a case in his inside pocket, but the man refused with a mechanical shake of the head.