From the rim they could see Malmsworth out there on the flat. He was making good time, but Captain DeCastros proceeded to demonstrate that he was no mean hiker, himself. Mr. Wordsley's side began to hurt, and his breath came with difficulty. He might have died, if he had not feared to incur DeCastros' anger.

At times the naked man was a broad, flat monster upon that shimmering tableland. Again he seemed almost invisible; then gigantic and tenuous.

Presently he disappeared altogether.

"Oho!" DeCastros said, "If I am not mistaken, old Malmsworth has holed up in that very same rift where we caught him at his dirty business seventeen years ago. He's as mad as a Martian; you can lay to that. He'd have to be."

The rift, when they arrived at its upper reaches, was cool and shadowy. In its depths nothing sparkled. It was ordinary limestone. The walls were covered with a dull yellow moss, except for great, raw wounds where it had been torn off.

"That's Malmsworth's work," Captain DeCastros said. "In seventeen years, Mr. Wordsley, one will consume a lot of moss, I daresay. Shall we descend?"

The rift had reached its depth quite gradually, so that Mr. Wordsley scarcely realized that they were going down until the surface glare was suddenly gone, and the green-walled gloom surrounded them. It might have been a pleasant place, but Mr. Wordsley did not like it.

Captain DeCastros was taking his time now, resting frequently. There was not the slightest chance of Malmsworth's getting away, for at the other end of the rift lay the cave and the abyss containing, at least, one ghost of Malmsworth's terrible past.

But though it might seem drab after the plateau and the plain, the rift had its points of interest. Along the walls, everywhere, as high as a tall man might reach, the moss had been torn or scraped from the surface. There was no second growth.

Every quarter of a mile or so they came upon the former campsites of the castaway, each marked by a flat-topped cairn of small stones three or four feet in height. DeCastros was at a loss to explain this. Mr. Wordsley supposed that it was one of the marks of a diseased mind.

Not that he actually understood the workings of a diseased mind. Privately, he suspected that DeCastros was a little mad. Certainly he was subject to violent, unreasonable 

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