dfastly at the
suspect. The suspect returned the look.

What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggard face covered to the upper bulge
of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and
inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which
protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been
shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But
what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general
unkemptness of the stranger's aspect was the look out of his eyes.
They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep,
and they glared into Waggoner's with a peculiar, strained, hearkening
expression. There was agony in them--misery unutterable.

Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his
voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before
he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical
falsetto:

"Why don't you say something to me, man?" he cried at the startled
Waggoner. "For God's sake, why don't you speak to me? Even if you do
know me, why don't you speak? Why don't you call me by my name? I
can't stand it--I can't stand it any longer, I tell you. You've got to
speak."

Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and
a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal
cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound
issued from his mouth.

The stranger, glaring into Waggoner's face with those two goggling
eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full
length and gave a great gagging outcry.

"It's come!" he shrieked; "it's come! The silence has done it at last.
It deafens me--I'm deaf! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"

He turned and ran south--toward the river--and Waggoner, recovering
himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these
two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow
their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could
utter no words; the other man did not.

A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank
of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without
checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of
sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the
body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner
afterward figured, it must hav