The Chief Legatee Part 26

"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 h.e.l.l-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 antic.i.p.ation with which they all turned as he stepped with his two a.s.sociates over the rope which had been stretched across the base of the out-curving head line.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed; 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.

Why had he, a humane man, consented to this attempt on the part of the devoted Hazen? That his mind might be free to mourn his beautiful young bride whose fatal and mysterious secret he was still as far from knowing as in the hour he turned to welcome her to their first home and found her fled from his arms and heart? Or had this suspense, this feeling of standing now, as never before, at the opening door of fate, a deeper significance, a more active meaning? Was this meditated test a crucial one, because it opened to him the only possible releas.e.m.e.nt of soul and conscience to the undivided care of one who had no other refuge in life save that offered by his devotion? The horror of this self-probing was still upon him as he followed Hazen's slight and virile figure across the rocks, but it fled as he felt the spray of the tossing waters dash its chilling reminder in his face.

The event was upon him and he must add to his former actions that of a complete and determined opposition to the risk proposed or possibly forfeit his peace of mind forever. Quickening his pace, he reached Hazen and the lawyer just as the men awaiting them had advanced on their side.

Instantly he knew it was too late. There was neither time nor opportunity for any weak protests on his part now. Older men were speaking; men who knew the river, the danger, and the man, but even they said nothing to him in way of dissuasion. They only pointed out what especial points of suction were to be avoided, and showed him the chain they had brought for his waist and how he was to pull upon it the very instant he felt his senses or his strength leaving him.

He answered as a courageous man might, and making ready by taking off his coat and shoes he gave himself into their hands for the proper fastening on of the chain. Then, while the murmur of expectation rose from the crowd on the river bank, he stepped back to Mr. Ransom and whispered hurriedly in his ear:

"You have a good heart, a better heart than I ever gave you credit for.

Promise that in case I never come out of those waters alive, that you will put no obstacle in the way of Mr. Auchincloss inheriting his fortune in good time. He's a man worthy of all the a.s.sistance which money can bring. _You_ do not need her wealth; Anitra--well, she will be cared for, but Auchincloss--promise--brother."

Ransom half drew back in his amazement. Then started forward again. This man whom he had always distrusted, whom he had looked upon as Georgian's possible enemy, certainly his own, was looking into his eyes with a gaze of trust, almost of affection. The money was not for himself; he showed it by the n.o.ble, almost grand look with which he waited for his answer; a look that carried conviction despite Ransom's prejudice and great dislike.

"You will give me that much additional nerve for the task lying before me?" he added. And Ransom could only bow his head. The man's mastery was limitless; it had reached and moved even him.

Another moment and a gasp went up from fifty or more throats. Hazen had taken the chain in his hand, walked to the edge of the rock and slipped into the quietest water he saw there.

"Strike left!" called out a voice. And he struck left. The eddy seized him and they could see his head moving slowly about in the great circle which gradually grew smaller and smaller till he suddenly disappeared. A groan m.u.f.fled with horror went up from the sh.o.r.e. But the man who held the chain lifted up his hand, and silence--more pregnant of antic.i.p.ation than any sound--held that whole crowd rigid. The man played out the chain; Harper stared at the seething, tumbling water, but Ransom looked another way. The torture in his soul was taking shape, the shape of a ghost rising from those tossing waters. Suddenly the pent-in breath of fifty b.r.e.a.s.t.s found its way again to the lips.

The men who held the chain were pulling it in with violent reaches. It dragged more slowly, stuck, loosened itself, and finally brought into sight a face white as the foam it rose amongst.

"Dead! Drowned!" the whisper went around.

But when Hazen was dragged ash.o.r.e and Ransom had thrown himself at his feet, he saw that he yet lived, and lived triumphantly. Ransom could not have told more; it was for others to see and point out the smile that sweetened the wan lips, and the pa.s.sion with which he held against his breast some sodden and shapeless object which he had rescued from those awful depths, and which, when spread out and clean of sand, betrayed itself as that peculiar article of woman's clothing, a small side bag.

"I remember that bag," said Harper. "I saw it, or one exactly like it, in Mrs. Ransom's hand when she got into the coach the day we all rode up from the ferry. What will he have to say about it? and could he have seen the body from which it has evidently been torn?"

CHAPTER XXVI

HAZEN

"An unfathomable man," grumbled Mr. Harper, entering Mr. Ransom's room in marked disorder. "They say that he has not spoken yet; but the coroner is with him and we shall hear something from him soon. I expect--" here the lawyer's voice changed and his manner took on meaning--"that his report will be final."

"Final? You mean--"

"What his fainting face showed. For all its pallor and the exhaustion it expressed, there was triumph in its every feature. The little bag was not all he saw in that pit of h.e.l.l. You must prepare yourself for no common ordeal, Ransom; it will take all your courage to listen to his story."

"I know." The words came with difficulty but not without a certain manly courage. "I shall try not to make you too much trouble." Then after a moment of oppressive silence, "Did you notice, when we all came in, the figure of a woman disappearing up the stair way? It was Anitra's and it paused before it reached the top, and I saw her eyes staring down at Hazen's helpless figure with a wildness in its inquiry that has sapped all my courage. How are we to answer that girl when she asks us what has happened? How make her know that Hazen is her brother and that he has just risked his life to satisfy himself and us that Georgian was really lost in that dreadful pool."

The lawyer, darting a keen glance at the speaker, softly shook his head.

"I am not thinking of Miss Hazen," said he. "I'm wondering how far the proof he has obtained will go." He paused, listening, then made a gesture towards the hall. "There's some one there," he whispered.

Ransom rose, and with a quick turn of the wrist pulled open the door.