of you," he added as he caught sight of Mr. Harper.

Entering slowly, he sat down in the chair proffered him by the lawyer.
There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality
which attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him very
closely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind
blowing through the hall made difficult to close.

"I--" The one word uttered, Hazen seemed to forget himself. Sitting quite
still, he gazed straight before him at the open window. There was little
to be seen there but the swaying boughs of the huge tree, but his gaze
never left those tossing limbs, and his sentence hung suspended till the
movement made by Ransom recrossing the room roused him, and he went on.

"I have made the plunge, gentlemen, and fortune favored me. I--" here his
voice failed him again, but realizing the fact more quickly than before,
he shook off his apathy, and facing the two men, who awaited his slow
words with inconceivable excitement, continued with sudden concentration
upon his subject, "I saw what I went to see--poor Georgian's body. I have
satisfied the coroner of this fact. The little bag I tore from her side
proves her identity beyond a doubt. You saw it, Mr. Harper. They tell me
that you recognized it at once as the same you saw in her hand in the
stage-coach. But if you had not, the initials on it are unmistakable, G.
Q. H., Georgian Quinlan Hazen. Auchincloss will get his money, and soon,
will he not? Answer me plainly, Harper. Such an experience merits some
reward. You will not make difficulties?"

"I?" The lawyer's query had a strange ring to it. He glanced from Hazen
to Ransom, and from Ransom back to Hazen, whose features had now become
more composed, though they still retained their remarkable pallor.

"If the proof is positive," he then went on, "you assuredly can trust
both my client and myself to remember our promise to you."

"The coroner, you say, is satisfied?"

"Yes, with the proof and my sworn statement. He is obliged to be. No one
else, least of all himself, feels any desire to go down to that whirling
eddy for confirmation of my story. And they are wise. I do not think
that any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths of
that vortex and come up alive. The noise--the swirl--the sense of being
sucked down--down in ever-increasing fury--but my purpose kept the life
in me. I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had s