“Halloo!  Yates,” he called out.  “Don’t you remember the day we tied two chickens together, leg to leg, and sent them tumbling down the hill back of old Wylie’s barn?”

“Alf Hazen!” shouted the fellow, thus accosted.  “Why, I thought you—­”

“Dead, eh?  Of course you did.  So did everybody else.  But I’ve come to life, you see.  With sad marks of battle on me,” he continued, dropping his hand.  “You all recognize me?”

“Yes, yes,” rose in one acclaim from a dozen or more throats after a moment of awkward uncertainty.

“I know the eyes,” vigorously asserted one.

“And the voice,” chimed in another.  After which rose a confused babel of ejaculations and exclamatory questions, among which one could detect: 

“How did it happen, Alf?” “What took off your jaw?” and other equally felicitous expressions.

“I’ll tell you all about that later,” he replied, after silence had in a measure been restored.  “What I want to say now is this.  Is it believable that simultaneously with my own return from the grave another member of my family should reappear before you from an older and much more certain burying?  I tell you no.  The riddle is one which calls for quite another solution and I have come to assist you in finding it.”

Here he cast a sinister glance at Ransom.

The latter met the implied accusation with singular calmness.

“Any assistance will be welcome,” said he, “which will enable us to solve this very serious problem.”  Then, as Hazen’s lip curled, he added with dignified candor, “I scorn to retort by throwing any doubt on your assertion of relationship to my lost wife, or the possibility of these good people being misled by your confident bearing and a possible likeness about the eyes to the boy they knew.  But one question I will hazard, and that before we have gone a step further.  Why does it seem so credible to you that Georgian, a much loved and loving woman, should have leaped to a watery death within a week of her marriage?  You have just stated that you found no difficulty in that.  Does not that statement call for some explanation?  All your old friends here must see that this is my due as well as hers.”

For an instant the man hesitated, but in that instant his hand slipped from his mouth over which he had again laid it, and his whole face, with its changed lines and the threatening, almost cruel expression which these gave it, appeared in all its combined eagerness and force.  A murmur escaped the watchful group about him, but this affected him little.  His eyes, which he had fixed on Ransom, sharpened a trifle, perhaps, and his tone grew a thought more sarcastic as he finally retorted: 

“I will explain myself to you but not to this crowd.  And not to you till I am sure of the facts which as yet have reached me only through the newspapers.  Let me hear a full account of what has transpired here since you all came to town.  I have an enormous interest in the matter;—­a family interest, as you are well aware for all your badly hidden insinuations.”