The half-insane ancient heard my outburst to the end, staring at me through the thick lenses of his glasses as if I was some new kind of a bug whose appearance he wished to implant firmly within his mind.

“Science calls for sacrifices,” he squeaked.  “If my daughters are heroines who wish to share my hardships in the pursuit of information that will be of great benefit to the world, I fail to see what it has to do with you, sir!”

“But they have no interest in your silly discoveries,” I cried.  “They are doing this infernal tramp to look after you.  Do you hear?”

“Confound you, sir!” he screamed.  “Mind your own business and don’t interfere with mine!”

I choked down my wrath as Leith came crashing through from the rear, and the old egoist, flushed and ruffled, dropped back to meet him, evidently convinced of my insanity through my inability to appreciate his efforts to prove that the skulls of long-dead Polynesians possessed peculiar formations they were foreign to the islanders of the present day.

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when we began to draw near the Vermilion Pit which Leith had mentioned when he had urged haste at the midday luncheon.  The surroundings became more strange and mysterious with each step we took.  The basalt peaks that we had noticed from the deck of The Waif were now quite close to us, and they seemed to move in upon us from both sides.  The trees and lianas became less numerous, and the black rocks came toward us in a sinister manner that conjured up thoughts of a dead something toward which the encircling ridges were guiding us like the arms of a corral.  The place was fear-inspiring.  It had the unearthly appearance that made the imaginative minds of the ancients people the silent woods with devils and dryads.  The soft moaning of the Pacific was barred out by the leafy barriers, and we walked in a silence that was tremendous.  The ticking of our watches sounded to our strained ears like the blows of a hammer, and once, when the Professor sneezed mightily, Miss Barbara gave a scream of fear before she realized what had caused the noise.

The ascent became still more difficult.  The natives puffed under their loads, and Holman rushed angrily to the front and demanded a halt on behalf of the girls struggling in the rear.  During the few minutes that Leith grudgingly allowed them in which to recover their breath, the youngster hurried up to the spot where I was busy fixing the loads of the natives, and in a nervous whisper he asked my opinion of the route.

“Where the dickens are we going?” he cried.

“This is the most eerie-looking patch of country that I have ever seen in my life.”

“Leith said that we had to reach the Vermilion Pit before the sun went down,” I replied.  “I guess it is somewhere at the end of this staircase that we are trying to climb.”

“Oh, Gee!” cried the boy.  “Say, this game has got those two girls scared to death.  There’s something wrong with the place, Verslun.  My skin feels it.  The island looks as if it has been left too long by itself, and I’m beginning to think that all those rocks and trees are watching us and wondering what we want here.”