And then, on the third day—­in the heart of this diseased and horrible region—­we made a discovery that drew a strange cry even from those mysteriously silent lips of M’sieu.

It was the print of a naked human foot in a bar of mud.

How it came there, why 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—­another miracle for which I have not tried to account; he built his cabin; for two years he had gone with his canoe to the shore of the great Slave, forty miles distant, for the food he ate.  But why was he here?