As told by them, the two had left their car at the swamp's edge and ventured for more than a mile into the morass, without finding any trace of the missing scientist. A mile in, though, they had abruptly come upon some things quite as inexplicable as the absence of Morton. These were great lanes of destruction which some force had torn across the forested swamp, wide paths in which the trees had been smashed down and crushed as though by the passage of some gigantic creature or creatures. And on the mounds and spots of solid ground along these pathways of destruction they had found strange large tracks, which could have been made by no conceivable living creature but which were entirely unexplainable otherwise. Gigantic and five-toed, these tracks were sunken deep in the soft earth, and were each a full square yard in size. Wherever the lanes of smashed trees lay the great tracks had been found also, seeming to lead inward toward the center of the swamp. The two men had stared at these for a time, dumfounded, and then, not daring to venture farther into the gloomy recesses of the swamp, had hastened back to Brinton with their story. Within minutes that story had spread over all of Brinton, and within hours it was being shouted forth by yelling newsboys in the Chicago streets. In itself the disappearance of so noted a scientist as Morton would have been startling, but coupled with the mysterious phenomena of the swamp it was sensational. By nightfall a dozen reporters and photographers had arrived in Brinton in quest of further details, and with them had come as a representative of the Northcote institution young Edward Rowan, who had been Morton's chief assistant. Rowan and the reporters found the little town in a state of turmoil that night, the one topic of excited discussion being the phenomena of the swamp. A posse was being formed, they learned, with which to beat the swamp from end to end on the next morning, in the hope of finding the missing scientist somewhere in its recesses. Young Rowan himself instantly volunteered as a member of the posse and was accepted. To those in Brinton, however, the disappearance of the scientist was almost a secondary consideration beside the strange tracks and pathways which had been found in the morass. Morton's disappearance, after all, might be due to his stepping into a quicksand, but no natural force or forces could account for the lanes of smashed trees and the giant tracks. No animal on earth, of course, was mighty enough to cause those tracks and pathways, yet what could have done so? Was the thing only a practical joke or hoax of some kind?