me!
Quick!"

Under the menace of the gun Wagg obeyed.

The young man pocketed the guns for a moment. He rolled the reviving
convicts off Britt and slashed the prisoner's bonds and tore the towel
from his face. It was in his mind to force Britt to crawl into the van.
He was regarding Britt as his chief witness and principal exhibit in the
exposure he proposed to lay before the people of Egypt. In the back of
Vaniman's head there may have been some sort of consideration for
the man who had ruined him--scruples against leaving him with those
renegades who had tortured him. However, the young man was conscious
of the more compelling motive--to carry Britt along with him, to force
Britt, before the eyes of men, to uncover the hiding place of the
treasure.

He trained his guns on the three men, backing away from them in order to
have them at a safe distance. Britt was on his knees. He was staring at
Vaniman with unblinking eyes in which unmistakable mania was flaming.
The attack on him in his bed that night, the blow that had stunned
him so that the assailants might tie him up, the ride in the strange
conveyance, the dreadful uncertainty of what it was all about--these
matters had wrought cruelly upon the victim's wits. The torture by the
flame had further unsettled his mind. And at that moment, coming down
from the heavens, so it seemed, a dead man had appeared to him.

Britt's recent experience had rendered him incapable of surveying the
thing from a normal viewpoint. He saw the man whom he had disgraced
by plot and perjury, the man who was buried under tons of rock, so the
state had officially reported, the man to whose return after seven years
of punishment Britt had been looking forward with dread. He had slept
more peacefully since that tragedy had been enacted at the prison. Britt
was not admitting that this was a human being in the flesh. Already
partially crazed by the manhandling from which he had suffered, he
peered at this apparition, a mystic figure in the aura of the fog--the
shade of Frank Vaniman, so his frantic belief insisted--and leaped up,
screaming like a man who had gone stark, staring mad.

Before Vaniman had time to issue a command Britt ran away along the lane
by which the van had entered the wood. He was an extraordinary figure in
flight. His night robe fluttered behind as he ran. For the most part he
hopped on one foot; he yelped with pain when he was obliged to set the
blistered foot on the g