een--and
proved--"

"What's that?"

The cry was from Mr. Ransom. A sudden gust of wind had torn its way
through the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor with
flying papers from the large stand in the window.

"Nothing but wind," answered Harper, half rising to close the door, but
immediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom. "Let be,"
he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order. "Keep Hazen
talking. It's important; imperative. I'll see to the door."

But it was the window he closed, not the door.

Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his most
trusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back to
Hazen instantly. That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havoc
it created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.

"I've led an adventurous life," he declared, "and, in the last few years
especially, passed through many perils and experienced much awful
suffering. I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair;
but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my
mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the
sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose
bottom no man had ever sounded.

"I went in young--I have come out old. Look at my hands--they shake like
those of a man of ninety. Yet yesterday they could have pulled to the
ground an ox."

"You saw Mrs. Ransom's body down in that pool some fathoms below the
surface," observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word from
the shrinking husband. "Won't you particularize, Mr. Hazen? Tell us just
how she was lying and where. Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know,
difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you."

"The coroner has the story," Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp of
the unwilling narrator. "But I will tell it again; it is your right, the
painful duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom,
but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the
force of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to
clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rush
and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but
enough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed,
and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which I
was just consci