For the first time since the stirring beginning of his adventures at Prince Albert a sickening sense of his own impotency began to weigh on Howland.

He was a prisoner--penned up in a desolate room in the heart of a wilderness.

And he, Jack Howland, a man who had always taken pride in his physical prowess, had allowed one man to place him there.
His blood began to boil as he thought of it.

Now, as he had time and silence in which to look back on what had happened, he was enraged at the pictures that flashed one after another before him.

He had allowed himself to be used as nothing more than a pawn in a strange and mysterious game.