was bent upon going there at all.... Hello! Here's the squelchy mark of a
man's boot, and here's another!"

They followed the track onward, with perfect ease, for the marshy ground
was sodden and took every footprint deeply. That some man had crossed
this way, and recently, too, was perfectly plain. The footprints wavered
a little that was all, showing that the man who made them was uncertain
upon his feet. And Wynne had left the house by no means sober!

"It looks as though he had come here after all!" broke out Tony West,
excitedly. "Why the track's as plain as the nose on your face."

They zig-zagged their tedious way out across the marshy grassland, their
thin shoes squelching in the bogs, their trousers unmercifully spattered
with the thick, treacley mud. They spoke little, their eyes bent upon the
ground, their foreheads wrinkled. On and on and on they went, while the
sky above them lightened and grew murky with the soft cloudiness of
breaking dawn. The flames in the distance began to pale, and the vast
stretch of Fen district before them was shrouded in a light fog, misty,
unutterably ghostlike and with the chill lonesomeness of death.

"Whew! Eeriest task I've ever come across!" ejaculated Stark with a
grimace as he looked up for a moment into the dull mist ahead. "If
we're not all down with pneumonia to-morrow, it won't be our own
faults!... Some distance, isn't it, Doctor?"

"It is," returned the doctor grimly. "What a fool the man was to attempt
it!... Here's a footprint, and another."

Yes, and many another after that. They staggered on, wet, cold,