"Let us start with Peterson—your leader. How much did you say he demanded, Mr. Potts, as the price of revolution?"
With a strangled cry Peterson sprang up as the American millionaire, removing his mask, stepped forward.
"Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, you swine, was what you asked me." The millionaire stood confronting his tormentor, who dropped back in his chair with a groan. "And when I refused, you tortured me. Look at my thumb."
With a cry of horror the others sitting at the table looked at the mangled flesh, and then at the man who had done it. This, even to their mind, was going too far.
"Then there was the same sum," continued Drummond, "to come from Hocking, the American cotton man—half German by birth; Stienemann, the German coal man; von Gratz, the German steel man. Is that not so, Peterson?" It was an arrow at a venture, but it hit the mark, and Peterson nodded.
"So one million pounds was the stake this benefactor of humanity was playing for," sneered Drummond. "One million pounds, as the mere price of a nation's life-blood…. But, at any rate, he had the merit of playing big, whereas the rest of you scum—and the other beauties so ably catalogued in that book—messed about at his beck and call for packets of bull's-eyes. Perhaps you laboured under the delusion that you were fooling him, but the whole lot of you are so damned crooked that you probably thought of nothing but your own filthy skins.
"Listen to me!" Hugh Drummond's voice took on
