asions was
somewhat irritating.

"What'll we do?" asked Holman.

"Get back," I answered. "He's either fooled us or he's lost his way."

Holman gripped One Eye by the neck and shook him roughly. The
youngster's temper was up, and it looked as if we had wasted the hours
we had spent in capturing the idiot alive, and the time lost in
following behind him through the canon and the crooked passage. And time
was precious when we thought of the agony which Edith and Barbara
Herndon were suffering.

In his temper Holman forgot that the prisoner was deaf, and he shouted
a question at him. "What the devil is wrong?" he screamed. "Damn you,
will--"

Maru interrupted with a cry of astonishment. The wall at the end of the
passage appeared to slide away, and, standing directly in front of us,
his big frame outlined against a fire of brushwood that blazed behind
him, was Leith!

Holman gave a yell of rage and sprang forward, and Leith turned and sped
into the gloom. In his astonishment at finding himself confronted by the
enemy when the stone door had rolled aside, Holman had forgotten that he
had a revolver in his possession, and Leith had passed the brushwood
fire before I yelled out to the youngster to shoot.

Holman fired immediately, and Leith staggered. For a moment we thought
that he was down, but he picked himself up and ran on. I snatched a
blazing pine limb from the fire as I rushed by, and with the light
flickering upon the walls of the place, we sped madly after the flying
figure that was barely discernible when the blazing branch flung a
splinter of light into the gloom.

Holman emptied the revolver, but the pounding of Leith's feet that came
back to us proved that he was still running. Maru and Kaipi were
hallooing far behind, but Holman and I ran side by side, our minds
unable to think of anything but the capture of the human tiger in front.

We were gaining on him. We could hear his laboured breathing, and I
remembered with a thrill of satisfaction the wound that he had received
the night before. It was only a question of time when we would have our
fingers on his throat. "Keep it up!" gasped Holman. "We've got him,
Verslun! We've got him!"

It looked like it. The red glow from the torch enabled us to catch an
occasional glimpse of shoes moving up and down at such a rate that the
limbs to which they were attached always remained outside the area that
was faintly illuminated. The momentary view of the footg