The stranger, glaring into Waggoner's face with those two goggling eyes of his, which were all eyeballs, threw up both arms at full length and gave a great gagging outcry. "It's come!" he shrieked; "it's come! The silence has done it at last. It deafens me--I'm deaf! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" He turned and ran south--toward the river--and Waggoner, recovering himself, ran after him full bent. It was a strangely silent race these two ran through the empty little street, for in the half-melted snow their feet made no sounds at all. Waggoner, for obvious reasons, could utter no words; the other man did not. A scant ten feet in the lead the fugitive reached the high clay bank of the river. Without a backward glance at his pursuer, without checking his speed, he went off and over the edge and down out of sight into the darkness. Even at the end of the twenty-foot plunge the body in striking made almost no sound at all, for, as Waggoner afterward figured, it must have struck against a mass of shore ice, then instantly to slide off, with scarcely a splash, into the roiled yellow waters beyond. The policeman checked his own speed barely in time to save himself from following over the brink. He crouched on the verge of the frozen clay bluff, peering downward into the blackness and the quiet. He saw nothing and he heard nothing except his own laboured breathing. The body was never recovered. But at daylight a black soft hat was found on a half-rotted ice floe, where it had lodged close up against the bank. A name was stamped in the sweatband, and by this the identity of the suicide was established as that of Congressman Jason Mallard. End of Project Gutenberg's The Thunders of Silence, by Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb