onsideration for a moment.

Lawyer Harper knew the world--or thought he did.

Next day the whole town was thrown into a hubbub. Word had gone out
through every medium possible to so small a place, that Alfred Hazen,
Georgian's long-lost brother, was going to dare Death Eddy in a final
attempt to recover his sister's body.

PART IV

The Man of Mystery

CHAPTER XXV

DEATH EDDY

It was a gray day, chill and ominous. As the three most interested in the
event came together on the road facing the point from which Hazen had
decided to make his desperate plunge, the dreariness of the scene was
reflected in the troubled eye of the lawyer and that of the still more
profoundly affected Ransom. Only Hazen gazed unmoved. Perhaps because
the spot was no new one to him, perhaps because an unsympathetic sky,
a stretch of rock, the swirl of churning waters without any of the
lightness and color which glancing sunlight gives, meant for him but one
thing--the thing upon which he had fixed his mind, his soul.

The rocky formation into which the stream ran at this point as into a
pocket, revealed itself in the bald outlines of the point which, curving
half-way upon itself, held in its cold embrace the unseen vortex. One
tree, and one only, disturbed the sky line. Stark and twisted into an
unusual shape from the steady blowing of the prevalent east winds, it
imprinted itself at once upon the eye and unconsciously upon the
imagination. To some it was the keeper of that hell-gate; the contorted
sentinel of bygone woes and long-buried horrors, if not the gnomish
genius of others yet to come. To-day it was the sign-post to a strange
deed--the courting of an uncanny death that one of the many secrets
hidden in that hole of miseries might be unlocked.

Under this tree a small group of strong and determined men was already
collected; not as spectators but helpers in the adventurous attempt about
to be undertaken by their old friend and playmate. The spectators had
been barred from the point and stood lined up in the road overlooking the
eddy. They were numerous and very eager. Hazen's brows drew together in
his first exhibition of feeling, as he saw women and even children in the
crowd, and caught the expression of morbid anticipation with which they
all turned as he stepped with his two associates over the rope which had
been stretched across the base of the out-curving head line.

[Illustration: "Cormorants!" escaped his