"You drew up her will," said he. "You must have reasoned with her on this very point as you are now trying to reason with me?"
The lawyer waved this aside.
"I didn't know at that time the social status of the legatee; nor did I know her brother then as well as I do now."
"You do not know me now."
"I know that you are very pale; that the determination you have just made has cost you more than you perhaps are willing to state. That there is mystery in your past, mystery in your present, and, possibly, mystery threatening your future, and all in connection with your great desire for this money."
Hazen made a forcible gesture, but whether of denial or depreciation, it was not easy to decide.
"Would it not then be better for all parties," pursued the lawyer, "for you to give me some idea of the great obligation under which your sister lay to this man, that I may have an answer ready when people ask me why she passed you so conspicuously by, in order to enrich this stranger?"
"The story is not mine. Had she wished you to know it, she would have confided it to you herself. I must decline—"
Mr. Harper interrupted the other impressively. "Do you realize what a shadow may be thrown upon your sister's memory by this reticence on your part? Her death was suggestive enough without the complications you mention. In justice to your relationship you should speak. If, as I think, the money is really meant for you, say so. The subterfuge may be difficult of explanation, but it will not hurt her memory as much as this extraordinary silence on your part."
"I am sorry," began Hazen. But Harper cut him short.
"You expect the money—you yourself," said he. "Nothing else would force you into an attempt so perilous. You would risk death. Risk something less final; risk your place in my esteem, your standing among men, and confess the full truth about this matter. If it involves crime—why, I'm a lawyer and can see you through better than you can win through by your own misdirected efforts. The truth, my lad, the truth, nothing else will serve you."
The look he received he will never forget.
"You are a man of limited experience, Mr. Harper," were the words which accompanied it. "You would not understand the truth, Georgian or me. Ransom might, but I shall not even risk Ransom's discretion. Now this is all I am going to say about this matter. Georgian's last will and testament, followed though it was by suicide, was a perfectly regular one. The only impediment to its being so recognized and acted upon is the doubt as to her actual decease. If the body of my poor young sister has become lodged in the Devil's Cauldron, I am going there to seek it. As the project calls for courage and, above all, a good condition of body and mind, I shall be obliged to you if you will allow me the benefit of the sleep I most certainly need. To-morrow I may have something more to say to you, and I may not. Perhaps I shall want to make my will, who knows?" And with a smile full of sarcastic meaning, he pushed Mr. Harper's arm aside and made for the staircase, up which he presently vanished without another attempt on the lawyer's part to hold him back.
A few minutes later the lawyer was getting what information he could about the so-called Devil's Cauldron.
It seems that this was a very deep hole in which, on account of the rocky formation surrounding it, the water swept in an eddy which had the force of a whirlpool. No one had ever sounded its depths and nothing had ever been seen again which had once been sucked into its deathly hollow. That Georgian's body had found its everlasting grave there, many had believed from the first, and if the conviction had not yet been publicly expressed it was out of consideration for Mr. Ransom, to whose hopes it could but ring a final knell.
"Where is the hole? How far from the waterfall?" queried Mr. Harper.
"A good mile," muttered one man. "Quite around the bend of the stream. It's a horrid place, sir. We've always been mortal careful about rowing down that side of the river. Children are never allowed to. Only a man's strength could get him free again if he once struck the eddy."
"Would anything floating down from the falls be apt to strike this eddy?"
"Very apt. It would be a miracle if it didn't. That is why we all turned out so willingly the first day. We knew that if Mrs. Ransom's body was to be found at all, it would be found then; another day it would be beyond our reach."
"You say that no one has ever sounded the depths of that hole. Has any one ever tried to?"
"More than once. Scientific men and others."
"Did they ever emerge—any of them?"
"Yes, one, a powerful sort of chap with Indian blood in him. But he didn't advise any one to try it; said the knowledge wasn't worth the strain to heart and muscle."
"What was the knowledge? We can imagine the strain."
"Oh, he said as how the walls of the vortex—didn't he call it a vortex—was all stone, and he spoke of a ledge—I didn't hear what else."
"To go down there a man would have to take his life in his hand, I see. Well, I don't think I will try," dryly observed the lawyer as he left the room.
He could no longer hide his excitement at the thought that Hazen meditated this undertaking.
"How he must want money!" thought he. That a man should face such a horror for another man's profit did not seem likely enough to engage his consideration 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.
"Cormorants!" escaped his lips. "They look for a feast of death, but they will be disappointed." He was almost bitter. "I shall survive this plunge. I have no wish for my death to be the holiday for a hundred gloating eyes, I am not handsome enough. When I die, it will be quietly, with some hand near, kind enough to cover my poor face with a napkin."