"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." "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.