it was there, and why if was a naked foot I
suppose were the first thoughts that leaped into our startled minds.
What man could live in these infernal regions? WAS it a man, or was it
the footprint of some primeval ape, a monstrous survival of the
centuries?

The trail led through a steaming slough in which the mud and water were
tepid and which grew rank with yellow reeds and thick grasses--grasses
that were almost flesh-like, it seemed to me, as if swollen and about
to burst from some dreadful disease, Perhaps your scientists can tell
why sulphur has this effect on vegetation. It is so; there was sulphur
in the very wood we burned. Through those reeds and grasses we soon
found where a narrow trail was beaten, and then we came to a rise of
land sheltered in timber, a sort of hill in that flat world, and on the
crest of this hill we found a cabin.

Yes, a cabin; a cabin built roughly of logs, and it was yellow with
sulphur, as if painted. We went inside and we found there the man whom
you know as Joseph Brecht. I did not look at M'sieu when he first rose
before us, but I heard a great gasp from his throat behind me. And I
think I stood as if life had suddenly gone out of me. Joseph Brecht was
half naked. His feet were bare. He looked like a wild man, with his
uncut hair--a wild man except that his face was smooth. Curious that a
man would shave there! And not so odd, perhaps, when one knows how a
beard gathers sulphur. He had risen from a cot on which there was a bed
of boughs, and in the light that came in through the open door he
looked terribly emaciated, with the skin drawn tightly over his cheek
bones. It was he who spoke first.

"I am glad you have come," he said, his eyes staring wildly. "I guess I
am dying. Some water, please. There is a spring back of the cabin."

Quite sanely he spoke, and yet the words were scarcely out of his mouth
when he fell back upon the cot, his eyes rolling in the top of his
head, his mouth agape, his breath coming in great panting gasps. It was
a strange sickness. I will not trouble you with all the details. You
are anxious for the story--the tragedy--which alone will count with you
gentlemen of the law. It came out in his fever, and in the fits of
sanity into which he at times succeeded in rousing himself. His name,
he said, was Joseph Brecht. For two years he had lived in that sulphur
hell. He had, by accident, found the spring of fresh, sweet water
trickling out of the hill--an