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 ground in order to recover his balance. Vaniman did not stay to threaten the three men. He had their weapons and he did not fear them. He ran after Britt. CHAPTER XXIX THE FOX WHO WAS RUN TO EARTH Vaniman's first impulse was to overtake the fugitive. He wanted to have Britt in his grip, holding to him, forcing him to confess and restore.