[Illustration:  “Cormorants!” escaped his lips.  “They look for a feast of death, but they will be disappointed.”]

“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.”

Harper and Ransom both remembered this remark a little while later.

“Mr. Hazen?” It was Harper who spoke.  They had passed a little thicket of brush and were drawing near the group under the tree.  “Have you duly considered what you are about to do?  I have talked with several men of judgment and experience about this attempt, and they all say it can have but one termination.”

“I know.  That is because they know little or nothing of the life I have led since I left this town.  There is not a man amongst them so slight and seemingly frail of figure as myself, but none of them, not one, has been so often up to the very gates of death and escaped, as I have.  My schooling has been long and severe, perhaps in preparation for this day.  I have been through fire; I have been through water.  The swirling of my own native stream does not appall me.  I rather welcome it; it is but another experience.”

“But for money?” broke in Ransom.  “You acknowledge it is for no other purpose.  Will it pay?  I own that in my eyes no amount of money could pay a man for so superhuman a risk as this.  Take a few thousands from me—­I had rather give them to you than see you leap into that water opening beneath us like a hungry maw.”

Hazen stood silent, his eye glistening, his hand almost outstretched.  Harper thought he would yield; the offer must have struck him as generous and very tempting—­a good excuse for a hot-headed man to withdraw from a very doubtful adventure.  But he did not know Hazen.  This latter advanced his hand and squeezed Ransom’s warmly, but his answer, when he was ready to give one, conveyed no intention of a change of mind.

“Will your thousands amount to a clean million?” he smiled.  “That is the amount, I believe, bequeathed by your wife to Mr. Auchincloss.  Nothing less will suffice.  Yet I thank you, Ransom.”

The latter bowed and fell a little behind the others.  The struggle in his mind had been severe; it was severe yet; he did not know but that it was his duty to stop this Hazen from his intended action by force.  He was not sure but that the onus of this whole desperate undertaking would yet fall upon him.  Certainly it would fall upon his conscience if the end was fatal.  He had had proof of that in the long night of wakeful misery he had just passed; a night in which he had faced the furies; in which this inexorable question had forced itself upon him despite every effort on his part to evade it.