“What’s that?”

The cry was from Mr. Ransom.  A sudden gust of wind had torn its way through the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor with flying papers from the large stand in the window.

“Nothing but wind,” answered Harper, half rising to close the door, but immediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom.  “Let be,” he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order.  “Keep Hazen talking.  It’s important; imperative.  I’ll see to the door.”

But it was the window he closed, not the door.

Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his most trusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back to Hazen instantly.  That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havoc it created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.

“I’ve led an adventurous life,” he declared, “and, in the last few years especially, passed through many perils and experienced much awful suffering.  I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair; but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose bottom no man had ever sounded.

“I went in young—­I have come out old.  Look at my hands—­they shake like those of a man of ninety.  Yet yesterday they could have pulled to the ground an ox.”

“You saw Mrs. Ransom’s body down in that pool some fathoms below the surface,” observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word from the shrinking husband.  “Won’t you particularize, Mr. Hazen?  Tell us just how she was lying and where.  Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know, difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you.”

“The coroner has the story,” Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp of the unwilling narrator.  “But I will tell it again; it is your right, the painful duty which we cannot escape.  She was lying, not on the bottom, but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the force of the current.  One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me.  When I arose, the rush and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but enough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed, and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which I was just conscious enough to hold on to with a frenzied grip.  We have spoken of this thing—­a little bag which must have been fastened to her side, for the end of its connecting strap is torn away by the wrench I gave it.”

“Vivid enough; but I am sure you will tell me one thing more.  Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm?  It would greatly add to the strength of your testimony if you could describe it.”