“Good Gawd!” he ejaculated, as he discerned their dark figures and the light of the doctor’s torch.  “Every one of ’em gone—­every one!” And then, trembling, he went back to bed.

But the doctor did not look back, and so the little party proceeded upon its way in comparative silence until the edge of the Fens was reached.  Here, with one accord, they stopped for further instructions.  Three torches made the spot upon which they stood like daylight.  The doctor bent his eyes downward.

“Now, boys,” he said briskly.  “Keep your eyes sharp for footprints.  Wynne must have struck off here into the Fens, it’s the most direct course.  He wouldn’t have been such a duffer as to walk too far out of his way—­if he 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, uncomfortable, anxious.  The doctor was a little ahead of the rest of them, Tony West came second, the others straggled a pace or two behind.  Suddenly the doctor stopped and gave a hasty exclamation: 

“Good Heavens above!”

They ran up to him clustering around him in their eagerness, and their torches lent their rays to make the thing he gazed at more distinguishable, while another mile away at least, the flames twinkled dimly, and slowly went out one by one as though the finger of dawn had snuffed them like candle-ends.

“What the devil is it?” demanded Tony West, getting to his knees and peering at the spot with narrowed eyes.