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.”