Chapter X Summary

The next morning, the scaffold is finished. The narrator notices that someone else has slept in the second bed in his room, and Pluck says it must have been Fox. Pluck and MacCruiskeen sleep in eternity, so they don't age, but Fox wants to die. Fox is insane because one day he looked at a card in a box in MacCruiskeen's room and the color drove him mad. Another man, Andy Gara, was driven mad by feeling the texture of the same card.

On the breakfast table, Pluck finds a note from Fox saying that seven one-legged men are on their way to rescue the narrator. Pluck takes the narrator out to the scaffold to kill him right away, and while he's making preparations, he tells the story of a man who went up in a balloon and disappeared. Later, his...